On the Emotion of Users in App Review | Hacker News Reader

On the Emotion of Users in App Review

medium.com

60 pointsmartensd11 comments

A slightly related note is that UI's are trending "dumber". More and more apps and websites I see are adding all this padding around things creating wasted space.

Once upon a time, someone figured out cramping everything together looked bad so they started adding more and more padding. Now it feels like I'm being treated like an infant who couldn't handle that many words on the screen and needs these playful distracting colors everywhere.

It seems like the power users that prefer denser interfaces are being ignored. And now, the users are starting to catch on that even though at first glance these apps are prettier they reduce productivity by showing less information, reducing features that confuse users, hiding buttons away, and having non-discoverable gestures.

I would love to see this dataset aimed at the switching of UIs to material design. A fair number of my apps have made the switch, and I've always been disappointed by the results.

It's funny I feel the same way. For instance, there has been a huge movement in EComm web applications to make checkouts more of a wizard flow. I always liked it when everything was on one page and I could just tab through forms, and not click on 10 next buttons.

I get that it lowers the amount of customer service issues with checkout because it can baby people through the process. They are missing the other side of the problem though, which is, it most definitely slows down the checkout process for people that know what they are doing. Also with the advent of auto fill utils it seems like a backwards approach or at least something that we will reverse once people become more familiar with auto fill capabilities.

Wow, I'm glad they brought up the iOS Gmail app redesign as an example. It took the Gmail team 7-8 releases over a 3 month period to finally restore functionality, but the app is still a user experience eyesore despite all the praise for Material Design. If you're changing the color scheme of an app people use every day, don't make it BRIGHT RED. Otherwise you receive reactions like this:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/V5muFb9...

If anyone is looking for an alternative, I'd recommend AirMail, or try using Charles Proxy and forcing iTunes to download Gmail 4.4 (the softwareVersionExternalIdentifier you'll want is 815948715).

Interesting, but after you said "we processed 7+ million app reviews" I was really expecting deeper insights.

This is a super exciting data set and I hope you can get more out of it: is it actually worth it to prioritize the features people are asking for? how long does it take to recover from a drop, can this be modeled somehow? how come some apps receive inconsistent emotion? etc

Thanks for your comment, MasterScrat. These are good points, actually our results are preliminary. As we consider this topic to be helpful for developers, we aim to further analyze the data.

I would be very happy to receive more replies like yours to come up with new ideas and different perspectives on how to look at the data, and to prioritize which questions to answer.

- I assume sentiment and star ratings are strongly correlated, but are there cases where these deviate?

- Is there any seasonality to review volume and/or sentiment (day of week, time of month/year/etc) that holds across many apps?

- Are there interesting differences in sentiment mean+variance by app category? For example, are utility app reviews more polarized than games?

> - I assume sentiment and star ratings are strongly correlated, but are there cases where these deviate?

> - Are there interesting differences in sentiment mean+variance by app category? For example, are utility app reviews more polarized than games?

These are answered in the white paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02256.pdf

The obvious point they should have learned from this data is to not change the UI unnecessarily. Sadly, they missed the elephant in the room.

jwz nailed this a ways back:

The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before. This does not often happen with Safari. Their UI has been remarkably stable for many, many years.

The constantly-changing Firefox UI is by design. They believe that user-experience bugs are just like all other bugs, and you can manage them in the same way: toss them into Bugzilla and "more eyes make all bugs shallow", etc. (Google takes this even further: all of their UI decisions are made statistically.) Apple doesn't believe that, and they develop their UI in dictatorial secrecy.

Here's a 50-minute talk by Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Mozilla, about how they do UI and why they think they should do it that way. It's interesting.

Maybe the Firefox team is right, and you can develop a better UI that way. Well, they haven't yet proved this, because Apple's UI is better.

Look, in the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. The Firefox crew believe otherwise. Good for them, and we'll see.

Meanwhile, I'm going to use the app whose UI works best, not the app whose development methodology most fits my political preconceptions.

If you read the soure, note that Jamie plays games with HN referrers. You may want to copy/paste this instead, hence the non-link.

    https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/

Always be improving, never removing.

Title is incorrect and nonsensical. Should be reviews rather than review, as per the article.

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