Objectives and Challenges of the Utilization of User-Interaction Data in Software Development

Understanding users, their requirements and usage patterns helps building better software. To continuously improve operations, user-interaction (U-I) data can provide developers with interesting new possibilities. This study aims at gaining an understanding of how software teams can start the use of U-I data and what challenges they face with it. In this paper, we describe three cases from different organizations. This includes explaining the activities, objectives, and challenges of each team in their efforts to begin using U-I data. We conducted the study with Action Design Research (ADR) method, resulting in findings from each case by intervening in the work of these teams. As a contribution, we designed a U-I data utilization method that summarizes teams' activities. Secondly, we refined and validated the categorizations of U-I data analysis and utilization objectives, and finally we categorized the challenges that the case teams faced. Together, these contributions lay out clear steps also for other software teams in starting the utilization of U-I data.