UI (User Interface) is an essential factor influencing users’ perception of an app. However, it is hard for even professional designers to determine if the UI is good or not for end-users. Users’ feedback (e.g., user reviews in the Google Play) provides a way for app owners to understand how the users perceive the UI. In this article, we conduct an in-depth empirical study to analyze the UI issues of mobile apps. In particular, we analyze more than 3M UI-related reviews from 22,199 top free-to-download apps and 9,380 top non-free apps in the Google Play Store. By comparing the rating of UI-related reviews and other reviews of an app, we observe that UI-related reviews have lower ratings than other reviews. By manually analyzing a random sample of 1,447 UI-related reviews with a 95% confidence level and a 5% interval, we identify 17 UI-related issues types that belong to four categories (i.e., “Appearance,” “Interaction,” “Experience,” and “Others” ). In these issue types, we find “Generic Review” is the most occurring one. “Comparative Review” and “Advertisement” are the most negative two UI issue types. Faced with these UI issues, we explore the patterns of interaction between app owners and users. We identify eight patterns of how app owners dialogue with users about UI issues by the review-response mechanism. We find “Apology or Appreciation” and “Information Request” are the most two frequent patterns. We find updating UI timely according to feedback is essential to satisfy users. Besides, app owners could also fix UI issues without updating UI, especially for issue types belonging to “Interaction” category. Our findings show that there exists a positive impact if app owners could actively interact with users to improve UI quality and boost users’ satisfactoriness about the UIs.

中文翻译：

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我应该如何改进我的应用程序的 UI？

UI（用户界面）是影响用户对应用程序感知的重要因素。然而，即使是专业设计师也很难确定 UI 是否适合最终用户。用户的反馈（例如，Google Play 中的用户评论）为应用所有者提供了一种了解用户如何看待 UI 的方式。在本文中，我们进行了深入的实证研究来分析移动应用程序的 UI 问题。特别是，我们分析了来自 Google Play 商店中 22,199 个热门免费下载应用程序和 9,380 个热门非免费应用程序的超过 3M 条 UI 相关评论。通过比较应用程序的 UI 相关评论和其他评论的评分，我们观察到 UI 相关评论的评分低于其他评论。通过手动分析 1,447 条 UI 相关评论的随机样本，置信水平为 95%，区间为 5%，“外貌，” “相互作用，” “经验，”和“其他”）。在这些问题类型中，我们发现“一般审查”是发生最多的一个。“比较评论”和“广告”是最负面的两种 UI 问题类型。面对这些 UI 问题，我们探索了应用所有者和用户之间的交互模式。我们通过审查-响应机制确定了应用所有者如何与用户就 UI 问题进行对话的八种模式。我们发现“道歉或感谢”和“信息请求”是最常见的两种模式。我们发现根据反馈及时更新 UI 对满足用户至关重要。此外，应用程序所有者还可以在不更新 UI 的情况下修复 UI 问题，特别是对于属于“相互作用”类别。我们的研究结果表明，如果应用程序所有者能够积极与用户互动以提高 UI 质量并提高用户对 UI 的满意度，则会产生积极影响。