Fostering creativity in the process of designing mobile applications

Abstract

Apps have gained more and more importance over the last decade. Unsurprisingly, the app market has become increasingly crowded. App designers may need to find ways to differentiate their apps from those of others. Creativity may be a resource needed to achieve this differentiation. Therefore, it may be worth fostering it. In this research, we set off to find out how the creativity of app designers can be fostered. We proposed a conceptual design for a tool that aims at achieving this objective. The design incorporates two main concepts that are central different fields, namely analogical reasoning and app review analysis. Taking this interdisciplinary approach aimed at tailoring general creativity research to the field in question to effectively support the creativity of the app designer. In essence, the proposed tool presents analogous apps as example solutions to a similar design problem. In line with that, this research proposed a way to describe apps in analogical terms and a method and associated theory to select appropriate analogous example apps. The tool also provides visualisations of features that are automatically extracted from the app reviews for each presented app. The approach proposed in this research combines both human and machine processing in the quest to foster the creativity of app designers. Both the automatic app review analysis and example app selection theory were validated. The preliminary tentative results of the validations give initial indications of the feasibility of the proposed design.