Users' Behavioral Strategies Toward Mobile App Problems: Fight or Flight

Abstract

In this paper, we identify two distinct behavioral strategies for dealing with problems encountered in the use of mobile apps - fight or flight. In the fight strategy, individuals do not give up using an app when faced with a problem; rather, they experiment with different ways to cope with that problem, whereas the flight strategy refers to the user's decision to uninstall an app when they encounter a problem and/or their intention to use an alternative app. These strategies were identified from an analysis of documents, which forty-two users reported, and can be used to understand how users deal with encountered problems. The participants were asked to use a mobile app of their choice for one week and report the behavioral strategies they utilized to counter problems they experienced. According to the findings obtained from content analysis, the most reported complaints concerned the categories of interface design, functional error, feature request, and feature removal. The participants who complained about functional errors, frustrating features, and slow application speed stopped using the app (flight behavior) whereas those that were dissatisfied with the interface, a missing feature or the content of the app continued to use the app and tried to overcome the problems (fight behavior).