The Hidden Value in App Reviews

The subject of App Store reviews has become a popular topic of late - I’ve read many interesting posts recently on prompting for app reviews, mostly focusing on how and when to best ask users to review an app. While the understandable focus of most posts tends to be about helping encourage positive reviews, you’re not able to account for the fact that folks who are wanting help, or simply unhappy with your app, will probably go straight to the App Store.

Negative, critical (or sometimes untrue) App Store reviews are tricky: nobody likes to hear blunt criticism, but there’s some great benefits to checking the App Store reviews frequently.

Don’t read the comments… always read reviews.

No matter how confident you are in the product you’ve shipped, there’s always going to be another feature that’s missing or something else that needs improving. App reviews are a place where users can let us know of these facts - and in addition to viewing feedback via our Help Centre, we’re always reading reviews.

I read the latest App Store reviews for our products each week. This helps identify potential trends of issues/requests that we’re seeing in other support channels (such as the Help Centre and Twitter) as well as being able to identify issues that may solely affect Mac App Store purchases (read iCloud) and not those downloaded directly from the Realmac Store.

I use both iTunes Connect and iTunes when reading reviews as both have their benefits - some of the team also use AppFigures and AppViz to check on reviews. iTunes Connect is particularly handy since reviews are categorised by country, so I can quickly switch between an app’s reviews from one territory to the next. As well as discovering localisation issues and requests in reviews from certain counties, I’ve found it fascinating to see certain feature requests occurring more often in some countries compared to others.

It’s also easy to subscribe to an RSS feed of your app’s reviews. Quickly click on the RSS button within iTunes Connect’s ‘Customer Reviews’ area to retrieve the address of the app-specific feed.

While I don’t find it as friendly to switch quickly between countries in comparison to iTunes Connect, I do use iTunes for a faster, more general, gauge on user feedback. iTunes offers the added extra of being able to report a concern for particularly unsuitable reviews. I’ve only ever used the ‘Report a Concern’ option a handful of times - and we don’t report concerns frequently.

Another option available when reporting a concern with a review in iTunes is the “I disagree with this review” item. I’ve most often felt like using this option when reading reviews that state the app (be it our app, or any other app) is missing a certain feature when the app does, in fact, contain that very feature. Ultimately though, it’s frustrating as you’d love to be able to help that customer instead of simply contending with the contents of a review.

Instead of filing a response to disagree with the review however, it’s a great opportunity to step back and ask myself how the user has missed the feature in the first place. Was it not obvious to the user how to access the feature? Is the function only accessible by an unintuitive gesture or contextual menu, perhaps? What can we do to improve this?

It’s these reviews that I find most valuable which, though initially viewed as negative, actually highlight a problem within the app that can be improved. The fix may be even be as simple as adding informative copy to an empty state or by letting users know ‘What’s New’ in updates to guide the user on how to use new features.

That’s why I always read reviews; it may be painful reading at times, but the extra perspective allows you to make better apps that makes users happy - and that’s what it’s all about.

Be sure to let me know on Twitter if you’ve any comments, questions or suggestions on this post!