Cigniti develops user sentiment tool for app testing

What is it that really annoys users of a banking app? Your quality assurance team may find a problem, but in a DevOps engineering environment that may not be the problem that needs to be fixed first. Cigniti, the Indian-based testing firm is tapping into reviews and comments posted by app users on social media sites to analyse their comments on the UX, security, performance and trust issues they care about. According to Rajesh Sarangapani AVP in the delivery department at Cigniti, the company’s sentiment analysis algorithms can sift through around one million online reviews in the space of two to three hours. The key sources are reviews posted by users on Google, the Apple Store, Twitter and Facebook. “In the old, non-digital world, app development was internal facing and centred on the enterprise. In the digital world app development has to be customer-centric and above all centred on the experience of mobile app users,” explained Sarangapani. Cigniti’s tools for analysing sentiment allow for continuous monitoring of customer reviews; and that can be fed back into the development process to identify faults that might otherwise be missed. “With a banking app, it might something as simple as users reporting that the app has started crashing regularly, that it has started running their battery down, or using up their data plan too quickly,” said Sarangapani. “The most common source of valuable feedback is often around the user experience,” he added. “For example bank customers saying that the app is taking them through various stages of signing up for something, and then finding that they have to go back to several stages to find information they need to complete the deal.” But the speed of sentiment analysis is perhaps most valuable when issues arise from a change outside the firm and its apps, such as an iOS 10 upgrade causing problems, for example. Other companies have designed algorithms that can sift through data generated by social media for sentiment analysis, of course, but Cigniti says its tool is unique because is designed to work with a domain-specific dictionary to identify the issues each customer cares about most. It is applying to patent the technology, it said.