Experience Report: Detecting Poor-Responsive UI in Android Applications

Good user interface (UI) design is key to successful mobile apps. UI latency, which can be considered as the time between the commencement of a UI operation and its intended UI update, is a critical consideration for app developers. Current literature still lacks a comprehensive study on how much UI latency a user can tolerate or how to identify UI design defects that cause intolerably long UI latency. As a result, bad UI apps are still common in app markets, leading to extensive user complaints. This paper examines user expectations of UI latency, anddevelops a tool to pinpoint intolerable UI latency in Android apps. To this end, we design an app to conduct a user survey of app UI latency. Through the survey, we find the tendency between user patience and UI latency. Therefore a timely screen update (e.g., loading animations) is critical to heavy-weighted UI operations (i.e. those that incur a long execution time before the final UI update is available). We then design a tool that, by monitoring the UI inputs and updates, can detect apps that do not follow this criterion. The survey and the tool are open-source released on-line. We also apply the tool to many real-world apps. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool in combating app UI design defects.

I. Introduction

Rapid user interface (UI) responsiveness is a critical factor in the software quality of mobile apps. Apps with poor UI responsiveness lead to many user complaints [1]. Such performance defects are threat to software reliability [2]–[4]. Figure 1 presents two examples of user complaints on Google Play, a popular Android app market. Users give the app a low rating due to its poor responsiveness. Users may also have different expectations about UI latency (i.e., the time between the commencement of a user operation and the corresponding UI update) in different UI operations. As suggested by the comments shown in Figure 1a, users “hate longer waiting than expected waiting time.” Achieving rapid UI responsiveness and designing better UIs to boost user patience have long been goals of both the academic and industrial communities [5].