An Exploratory Study for GUI Posts on Stack Overflow

Graphical User Interface (GUI) has become one of the most effective human-computer communication medium today. The quality of GUI is essential to the success of apps, especially for mobile apps. Developers not only have to understand the interaction of various components, but also follow the principles of design and implementation. It is helpful for developers to understand the challenges via analyzing the questions and answers (Q&A) on GUI development. However, there is no large-scale study on the GUI development posts on Stack Overflow. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on 23,741 posts related to GUI development on Stack Overflow. We first extract 20 topics related to GUI development using topic modeling. After manually classifying these GUI topics into 5 categories, we further quantitatively analyze the popularity and difficulty of GUI topics, the correlation between these two aspects, and qualitatively analyze the distribution of question types in posts. Finally, we have some interesting findings. These findings contain that the topic "tool selection" is the most popular topic, the topic "thread" has the highest percentage of unaccepted answers, and the topic "client/server" answer takes the longest time to be accepted. In addition, we discuss about possible inspirations of our research to GUI development stakeholders.