Exploring Mobile Application User Experience Through Topic Modeling

Exploring user satisfaction and experience is the first step of software product improvement and business sustainability. The primary goal of this research is to investigate how companies can use topic modeling to understand mobile application user experience and offer methodological steps for identifying factors shaping it. SalesForce was selected for this case study as it was the most widely used CRM application in 2023. This study aims to uncover factors influencing positive and negative user experience, to compare and systematize them, and to indicate the business implications of topic modeling findings. For this study, authors collected 9081 online reviews of the SalesForce application from Google Play Store. The corpus is divided into three subsets based on the associated star ratings, where four and five stars indicate positive sentiment, three mixed sentiment, and two and one negative. Each subset is analyzed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, hyper-parameters were fine-tuned, and the experimental models were evaluated with coherence measures to determine the model with the optimal number of topics. The results indicate that the driving factors of positive experience are seamless functionality and reliability, design flaws and performance issues shape negative experiences, and mixed experiences arise from inconsistencies in usability and authentication challenges.