Superior mobile user experience

: superior customer evaluation? : impact of personalized features in food and cooking apps

Abstract

As the smartphone, mobile application, and healthy lifestyle markets are exploding, companies are facing the challenge of offering high-quality and user-friendly apps. Focusing on healthy lifestyle and food apps, the market offers several mobile applications dealing with the usage and success of behavioral change techniques. None has ever researched if and to what extent specific features, such as personalization, have an impact on customer evaluation when focusing on customer responses in app stores.This dissertation is aiming to assess personalization in food and cooking apps while focusing on the impact it might have on customer ratings and downloads in app stores. To objectively assess personalization, features related to communication, interface, engagement and acknowledgement matter. Therefore, a reliable personalization scale, with an excellent interclass correlation coefficient (0.87) and Cronbach’s  (0.92) capturing these features was developed to categorize and rate 52 food and cooking apps. The data were statistically analyzed by using a generalized linear model and plotted against publicly available data such as the number of app downloads, ratings, and the business model. The results show that customer store ratings and app downloads are not directly related to personalization features and do not vary much across apps. Nevertheless, app downloads are dependent on the combination of the type of food and cooking apps, the applied business model, and customers’ evaluation of personalization and if they express it whether positive or negative. Overall marketers and app developers should focus on including more personalization in free recipes apps.

Date of Award	4 Feb 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Isabel de Almeida Costa (Supervisor)