Feature Analysis: A Method for Analyzing the Role of Ideology in App Design

Many apps are designed to solve a problem or accomplish a task, such as managing a health condition, creating a to-do-list, or finding work. The solutions that app developers offer reflects how they believe that users and other stakeholders understand the problem. Each individual developer may have...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of digital social research Vol. 3; no. 2; pp. 89 - 113
Main Authors: Hasinoff, Amy A., Bivens, Rena
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: DIGSUM – The Centre for Digital Social Research at Umeå University 02.09.2021
DIGSUM
Subjects:
affordances
app studies
content analysis
mobile apps
software studies
ISSN:2003-1998, 2003-1998
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Many apps are designed to solve a problem or accomplish a task, such as managing a health condition, creating a to-do-list, or finding work. The solutions that app developers offer reflects how they believe that users and other stakeholders understand the problem. Each individual developer may have different ideas but analyzing many apps together can reveal the average or typical ways that developers in the set think about the problems that their apps are designed to solve. Building on content analysis, interface analysis, the concept of affordances, and speculative design, this article offers a new method that we call “feature analysis” to analyze what a set of apps designed to solve the same problem can tell us about the relationship between app design and ideology. By counting and classifying the features in a set of apps, feature analysis enables researchers to systematically answer questions about how app developers’ design choices reflect existing cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies.
ISSN:2003-1998
2003-1998
DOI:10.33621/jdsr.v3i2.56