Mobile Augmented Reality Apps in Education: Exploring the User Experience Through Large-Scale Public Reviews

Augmented reality (AR) is considered one of the top technologies that will revolutionize the future of education. Real-time interaction, different formats of visualization, and the merge of the real and digital world may open up new opportunities for teaching and learning. Although AR is easily accessible via mobile phones, the extent to which this technology will be adopted greatly depends on the user experience. The user reviews of mobile applications or so-called "apps" are a potential source of information for designers, software developers, and scholars interested in understanding the user experience. This study investigates the current state of the user experience of augmented reality apps by extracting and classifying the information from reviews published in the Google Play Store. A set of 116 educational mobile AR apps were mined from the Google Play Store, and a total of 1,752 user reviews were retrieved and classified. Results suggest developers of educational mobile AR apps need to solve technical problems, improve certain features, and provide more explicit instructions to users. Regardless of these needs, users recognize that these apps have great potential as educational tools. Future developments should focus on tackling these shortcomings, expanding the use of AR apps to more fields of education, and targeting specific audiences to extend the technology adoption.