How to ask for reviews without feeling icky about it | Hacker News Reader

How to ask for reviews without feeling icky about it

m.signalvnoise.com

80 pointscoloneltcb29 comments

The best way to ask for reviews is to use my Review Buddy service:

All you have to do is enter your app's bundle identifier, and then my system takes care of prompting the user for reviews at appropriate times. It's totally free and you don't even have to integrate an SDK, it's completely automatic.

Hi, can you briefly explain how this works? I didn't find any explanation on the website.

It's a placebo. It's never appropriate to prompt your users for a review, so it can accomplish its task of asking users when appropriate without doing anything at all.

It would be nice if this was an OS feature instead of implemented differently by every app developer. That way it could also be disabled system-wide with a single setting. The OS could either show a nice dialog on update as shown in the article, or show it after the user has launched the app a certain number of times. Rating good apps that people use frequently is a benefit to all users.

> It catches the customer at a good time because we just gave them something new.

Now ask for a review after a crash. This is just asking "we introduced new stuff, you like the idea?" when really progress comes from asking "you've now been using X that we introduced Y ago, how's it working for you?"

For the products that are regularly used by me or my team, I love reading about new features. In fact I've subscribed to the product update emails of our most important software.

This because often, new features means increased efficiency or new capabilities for the team and I. And I love it when that happens.

If they've developed a feature that I wanted for sometime or solves a current problem, I'm almost certain to rate them highly.

When an app asks for a review, I typically go and leave a one star review.

That's ridiculous, given 99.95% of users will never leave a review unless prompted. That's like saying: I love your product, but if you DARE ask me to leave a review, I'm going to be a hater. That makes absolutely no sense to me.

If an app interrupts my workflow for no benefit, that is a legitimate negative point against it. If it does this repeatedly (many apps nag a lot) then that can substantially impact its usability.

Me too, I don't like being interrupted for no good reason, I do the same to Ebay sellers who pester for feedback.

I pee on the floor whenever I go to a public bathroom.

Interesting to read all the complaints about these types of popups. I also dislike those. But what's clear from this post is that most people are actually happy about them or at least that they don't result in lots of negative reviews but rather lots of positive ones.

I love it when an a/b test or some other type of experiment blows in the face of our personal bias.

Lots of positive reviews doesn't necessarily mean most people are happy. It could be that the unhappy people don't click the "leave a review" button, or that they're slightly unhappy but not enough to leave a review. If you think about it, it's actually quite hard to tell for sure whether something makes people happy or not.

When I see the what's new screen I always visually scan for the dismiss button, which has now been changed to no thanks. I don't want to see a what's new menu, I don't want it longer, I want to open the app do what it was I came for and get on with whatever I was doing.

True, but that reading 4 bullet points takes ~5 seconds and you might have a new feature which really helps you and you might miss it otherwise.

You're appealing to "Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)" from an article that was posted to HN a few days ago[1].

Yes, there's a very small chance that I might miss a feature that I care about. However, there's a 100% chance that if I read your popup, I'm not spending that time doing something else that I know I want to do because I consciously chose to do it.

And let's not pretend that it's just 5 seconds this one time. Website and app behaviors like this eat up 5 seconds load time on a slow phone, 5 seconds to read, 30 seconds to remember what you were doing before your attention was hijacked, 3 minutes and $10 to add data to your phone plan because you used up all your data, over and over and over again. Because lots of sites do this, and that time and loss of attention adds up.

So frankly, I don't care about your ad for your new feature (and let's be clear, it is an ad). I'd rather have the 5 seconds and other things you're taking from me with that What's New section, and if you do this kind of thing consistently, I'll go elsewhere.

[1] https://medium.com/@tristanharris/how-technology-hijacks-peo...

No, you won't go elsewhere. If you or your team is using the tool and managing projects + clients on it, then you're deriving value out of it. In most cases you'll appreciate the new features and if you see something new every other week then you'll be impressed at the speed at which they're adding features.

Your increased efficiency is worth far more than the 5 seconds and $10. You can argue that you're not the target customer of the tool. In that case your comment is meaningless.

Also, don't mind me saying this, but your comment reeks of classic HN bullshit where anything deemed 'marketing/advertising' is made to seem like it's bad.

> No, you won't go elsewhere. If you or your team is using the tool and managing projects + clients on it, then you're deriving value out of it.

It's pretty bold to claim you can predict my behavior better than I can. Just because I'm deriving value from your product doesn't mean I can't derive more value from a tool that respects my time and attention.

> In most cases you'll appreciate the new features and if you see something new every other week then you'll be impressed at the speed at which they're adding features.

If it doesn't already have enough features for me to derive value from it, I wouldn't be there, as you said. So generally, new features added after I have been using the product for a while are nice-to-haves, not need-to-haves.

I don't use products because I'm impressed by the speed with which they add features I mostly don't need, I use products because they solve a problem for me. In fact, many times modifications to good tools break things that were working for me before. I'd rather see slow, careful modifications driven by my needs rather than rapid development that's shoved in my face constantly.

> Your increased efficiency is worth far more than the 5 seconds and $10.

This would be relevant if interrupting my workflow for features I mostly don't want or need increased my efficiency, but it doesn't.

> Also, don't mind me saying this, but your comment reeks of classic HN bullshit where anything deemed 'marketing/advertising' is made to seem like it's bad.

I don't mind you saying that. I myself will openly say that marketing/advertising are harmful to me, other users, and society.

Are you a paying user of Basecamp or any of its direct competitors? Jira wouldn't be a competitor.

So because it's the best choice for the target customer, it is okay if they are slightly annoyed by the popups, as long as the annoyance is not big enough for them to bail? Because that is what your comment sounds like.

(If I really care about a product, you can subscribe me to the update newsletter or the blog feed. Which I can read when I'm reading other things, at a time I like. Consider a "don't show this again, but sign me up for the newsletter" button, I can't think of an app right now where I wouldn't prefer that.)

They won't be annoyed if the updates are valuable enough. They're more likely to appreciate and be happy about them.

And they wouldn't be happy if you told them about the updates in a different channel? I of course can only talk about my perspective, but nearly every time I encounter such a screen, I couldn't tell you if its contents were valuable or not, because I'm angrily smashing the screen to make it go away. If the prominent button on that screen took me to the app store, I'd be even more annoyed. Given that their ratings haven't tanked because of that it seems that this is a minority feeling, but a user should still be able to turn it off.

I agree with you, I am like you as well. I automatically close popups.

But as this article demonstrated, the general population does not.

If you use an app infrequently enough that it updates between each use, you'll see an alert every time you open the app! 5 seconds isn't that much, but many 5-second inconveniences add up. Plus, if you have to read a bunch of text to understand the features of your app, most people are going to miss the features anyway.

If you use an app infrequently enough that it updates between each use, then it isn't going to be adding up to much.

It may well be the major thing you remember about the app, though.

I dont think that it was a bunch of text - each feature was one short bullet point. How would you communicate new features more efficiently?

These review/rating popups really annoy me, though the mechanism they're using in this post might not be as bad.

Can you imagine if websites nagged you in this same way? Why do we think it's an acceptable user experience to nag in apps?

We don't, but it translates into serious increases in downloads if done right. It's pretty hard to ignore, though I don't do that in my current apps.

One area where this can be addressed is at the App Store level; change the incentives so writings reviews aren't so important. If the OS is collecting how much people use an app, for instance, why not more highly rank apps in the App Store that demonstrate consistently high use?

I also hate modal dialogs on general principals. If I'm focused on a task, I will immediately dismiss the dialog without even trying to interpret the meaning.

I'd like to see apps try to implement this kind of message within the normal UI without forcing the immediate priority over my own needs.

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