Studying Expectation Violations in Socio-Technical Systems: a Case Study of the Mobile App Community

With information technology mediating most aspects of contemporary societies, it is important to explore how human-oriented concepts may be leveraged to explore human actions in this new dispensation. One such concept is expectation violations. Expectations govern nearly all aspect of human interactions. However, while this phenomenon has been studied in human-human contexts where violations are expressed through verbal or non-verbal forms, little effort has been dedicated to the study of expectations in human-software contexts in socio-technical systems. We have thus studied expectation violations in one such instance, the mobile app community. Using Expectation Violation and Expectation Confirmation theories, we studied users’ reviews of four apps in the health and fitness domain to understand how this app community responds to expectation violations, and if users in a similar domain will express dissatisfaction about similar expectation violations. Our outcomes confirm that the mobile app community responded to expectation violations, just as individuals do in human-human settings. In addition, we observed that users of different health and fitness apps reported similar expectation violations, as is the case for individuals and groups sharing culturespecific expectations. Beyond being of practical relevance for the app community, our outcomes also highlight opportunities for extending the abovementioned theories.