Measuring Smartphone User Experience through a Hierarchical Metric Framework via Social Media Reviews

Abstract

Smartphone user experience (UX) is widely expressed in user-generated online discourse across platforms, creating opportunities for in-the-wild measurement at scale. However, existing UX instruments and review-mining approaches do not provide a smartphone-oriented, theory-grounded hierarchical measurement specification that supports consistent aggregation and comparison across heterogeneous platforms. In this research, we propose a hierarchical smartphone UX measurement framework and an interpretable computational pipeline that translates cross-platform reviews into structured UX metrics. The pipeline extracts localized experience evidence units, maps them to the hierarchy via coarse-to-fine classification, and quantifies evaluations with a unified five-level satisfaction sentiment model. We apply the approach to a stratified subset of approximately 20,000 Chinese social media reviews covering four major smartphone brands across three platforms. The resulting metrics separate what users discuss, captured by normalized mention frequency, from how they evaluate it, captured by mean five-level sentiment scores. This work provides a scalable and interpretable evidence base for cross-brand comparison and metric-level interpretation beyond raw review volume or single-platform observations.