Mining whining in support forums with frictionary
Amy J. Ko · 2012
Millions of people request help with software in support forums, creating a massive repository of user experiences ripe for mining. We present Frictionary, a tool for automatically extracting, aggregating, and organizing problem described in support forums, enabling timely problem frequency and prevalence metrics. We applied it to 89,760 Firefox support requests from 4 sources gathered over 10 months. Interviews with the Firefox principal designer and support lead suggest that Frictionary could be a useful tool for prioritizing engineering efforts, but that the extraction would need to be more precise to be useful.