Abstract
Disclaimer: This master’s project is authored solely by Riddhi Shah. The article of the same name by Dr. Jingwei Yang, the student’s committee chair, it is located at the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9218205.
Summary: With the recent advancement in data science, predictive analytics (PA) as a type of technologies has been built into many commercial products as a functional feature. However, the application of PA could also affect several non-functional goals, including the products’ usability, performance, transparency, users’ privacy and well-being. And it remains unknown what specific impactions that service providers need to deal with, and to what extent. This research aims to explore and determine benefits and concerns that end users have while using products with PA built-in, and how these benefits and concerns affect their product adoption decision. A survey was conducted in a sample of 188 respondents from U.S., with regards to their acceptance of the application of PA in consumer products. The results suggested that use of PA improves realization of convenience and performance non-functional requirements, and thereby it increases use of products. It was also discovered that use of PA brings negative effect on privacy, transparency, and personal well-being non-functional requirements, which may further impact product adoption or even hurt business success. Based on such results, several scenario-based recommendations have been made for business owners and service providers, with regards to the strategies that they could use to maintain and even increase their consumer base.