Are App user reviews worth reading?

Are app user reviews worth reading?

What have I learned from reading thousands of user reviews?

Recently, I looked at the thousands of user reviews for our app, Dropbox. I'm torn between these comments, but I have to say this is the most fun thing I've done all year. Some of these comments made me laugh, some made me sad, and some even made me feel a little warm.

Why in this world would anyone read so many user reviews? Okay, I admit it, this is my job. I want to understand our users and how they use our product.

Yes, we were doing user research on Dropbox, but I wanted to go a little deeper. I want to hear what people all over the world are saying about our products. I want to get first-hand information. I want to see their real evaluations - the anger they write in user reviews, the praise they give us, and so on.

After reading these user reviews, I have to say that it really makes me feel ashamed. I learned a lot of new things from our users, things I had never seen before.

Are you a little curious about what I found? The following are the main feelings I gained from these user reviews.

1. People simply want to be heard

The first thing that struck me when I was reading these user reviews was that people had such strong opinions about our app. When I read page after page of user reviews, I found that many people like to use words like "most XXX", such as: best, worst. These words appear again and again in user reviews.

For example, here are a few user reviews of our app:

After a simple sorting of these reviews, I found that more than 70% of app user reviews were either 5-star or 1-star, and more than two-thirds of the reviewers neither liked nor hated our app.

Why does such an extreme situation occur? There have been many theories that attempt to explain these extreme reactions, but I prefer to believe that people just like to express their opinions online.

People want to be heard, and they want your attention through 1-star reviews or 5-star reviews.

2 People are eager to know what happened

A year ago, we decided to stop writing our iOS and Android release notes. Instead, we decided to use a generic template that explains how we "regularly release updates". Although we really want to continue writing the release notes for the app, due to some internal reasons, it is difficult to continue.

You might be thinking, “Who actually reads app release notes?” Well, here’s the thing: a lot of people do. Since we stopped updating the app release notes, 12% of users started complaining about our generic release notes. More than one in every 10 user reviews are complaints.

A few months later, we saw user comments like this:

This is true. Thousands of users gave our app one-star reviews simply because of our release notes.

After that, we decided to take this matter seriously. With the workflow issues resolved, I’m happy to report that we are now carefully writing release notes for each of our iOS and Android versions. Have to admit, if it weren't for these user reviews, we would never have done this.

3. People use apps in strange ways

People are very creative and you never know how they will use your app.

Did you know that Play-Doh was originally designed to be used for wallpaper cleaning? Then the founders of Plasticine discovered that some people were using their product in art projects.

Later, the company that made plasticine decided to adjust its product and market direction and turned plasticine into a toy for children. This is really talented. After that, Plasticine sold out, and now it is one of the most famous toys of the 20th century.

I really appreciate these user reviews, which let me see all kinds of interesting ways people are using Dropbox. For example, I find that people think of Dropbox as a music player or a note-taking app.

With these ideas in mind, our team can design features that are better suited for these scenarios, like adding a random button or designing faster ways to help take notes. Who knows? These user reviews might inform our next big feature.

4. Feedback is purposeful

It's hard for us to create a product. As we go about our daily work, it’s easy to lose sight of how we’re impacting people’s lives. Regularly checking the user reviews of the app is really important for product planning.

Every once in a while, I see some personal notes from users, and it warms my heart.

Sometimes, I see a comment that makes me feel heartbroken.

Regardless of whether these user reviews are good or bad, I see that users make comments with a purpose. User feedback is a gift to a product. Of course, sometimes the gift isn't what we expected, but it's still valuable.

User feedback allows us to see that our products are actually being used by people. These user reviews allow us to see that we are designing for every real person, not just for the company’s performance or goals.

5. User ratings are greatly affected by country

Although our Dropbox is released in more than 100 countries, except for the different languages ​​on the UI interface , everything else is basically the same.

Since the app is the same in every country, you might think that the ratings of our app in every country would be roughly the same, right? However, the fact is: our app ratings in each country are completely different.

Let’s take a look at the user review data for our iOS app. In the United States, the number of users who gave 5-star reviews was roughly the same as the number of users who gave 1-star reviews. But in Japan, the number of users who gave 1 star rating was twice that of users who gave 5 stars. In Brazil, the data is different again, with only slightly more users giving 5-star reviews than 1-star ones.

What is the reason? I guess there may be two reasons:

• The quality of language translation. Some languages ​​are difficult to translate. If our translation is hard for users to understand, people might give us a low rating for our app.
• Cultural differences. The survey results show that there are cultural differences in how people do research. The user reviews of the app are equivalent to a survey.

Many years ago, Dropbox launched a global survey on the quality of app UI copywriting. Guess which language got the lowest rating? Japan. This also means that our app’s translation into Japanese is of lower quality, which is likely responsible for our app’s low rating in Japan.

Brazilian Portuguese, on the other hand, is a branch of English. Is it possible that Brazilians like to give high app ratings? That's very likely. Because the results of a survey conducted by YouTube's Brazilian team a few years ago also reached similar conclusions.

6. Android users are more likely to be satisfied than iOS users

Okay, I admit, this question confuses me. For some reason, Android users rated our app higher than iOS users.

The data is here, you can see it for yourself.

This was shocking to me because there is absolutely no difference between our iOS and Android versions.

But what is the reason for this? I haven't found a theory to explain this phenomenon yet, but I will study it in depth later. If you have any theories that explain this, or if you’re researching this topic, I’d love for you to let me know in the comments.

This may be the riddle of our time: Are Android users more satisfied overall? Do they have lower expectations for apps? Or is there some other reason?

Do you read user reviews of apps?

I conducted a survey on Twitter and found that 37% of app developers said they rarely or never read user reviews of their apps. Are you one of them?

Of course, I also know that reading user reviews of apps takes a lot of time, but I think after reading user reviews, you will feel that the time is well spent. If you want to know who is actually using your app, you can read what they are saying in the user reviews. Besides, if your users take the time and effort to share some interesting feedback with you in a user review, shouldn’t you take the time to listen to what they have to say?

Whether you’re a developer, designer, copywriter, or product person, I bet you can learn a lot of interesting things from user reviews.

At the very least, it will encourage you to write an article on Medium.