The Way it Makes you Feel Predicting Users - Engagement during Interviews with Biofeedback and Supervised Learning

Capturing users’ engagement is crucial for gath- ering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collect and analyze users’ feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These ap- proaches are hardly applicable in bespoke software development, or in contexts in which one needs to gather information from specific users. In such cases, companies need to resort to face-to- face interviews to get feedback on their products. In this paper, we propose to utilize biofeedback to complement interviews with information about the engagement of the user on the discussed features and topics. We evaluate our approach by interviewing users while gathering their biometric data using an Empatica E4 wristband. Our results show that we can predict users’ engagement by training supervised machine learning algorithms on the biometric data. The results of our work can be used to facilitate the prioritization of product features and to guide the interview based on users’ engagement.