Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns • Hacker News Board

Re: Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns

#21

Post by mikey_p » Mon, May 21, 2012, 6:26 PM UTC

harrybr wrote: post #20

ouriel wrote: post #17

Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire Thanks for the comments and interesting conversation. Here is a comment i just posted to the author of the post. I hope it brings some light on the situation. ==================================== i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster. First off App booster is a dialog system between the developer and the user. It includes a among other elements a simp…

Article author here. It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing. However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic (diagram from article): http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2012... After a user su…

One point of note is that you selected "bug" for the category/tag for your feedback. By almost anyone's definition of review vs. bug report there is a big difference and posting a bug report as a review doesn't ensure that the developer would see that info.

I'm not claiming what they're doing is ideal, but I can see a strong argument for not sending bug reports to the app store reviews.

Re: Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns

#22

Post by tinylittlefish » Mon, May 21, 2012, 6:31 PM UTC

clarky07 wrote: post #19

studio625 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you can find a subtle way to segment your users by their sentiment towards your app, you can then ask one of those segments to write reviews and not the other, thus skewing the ratings." It skews the ratings in your favor, deceiving future users about the actual quality of the app.

Not necessarily. Anyone who has had an app on the store knows that there are lots of reviews that are simply inaccurate. If unhappy users would contact the devs first, many "problems" can be easily solved. For example, many people don't understand lots of apple's UI decisions that we take for granted. I had a user contact me and ask if our app did X. It does, I told him that, and he bought the app. Then I got an angr…

Right, this is a very good point. Many one star app reviews are there because the user is frustrated and doing something wrong.

I have one review in which a person said my app only allows 10 entries (it allows unlimited entries). One-star review, and I can't contact them to fix the problem. If I had a system like this implemented, likely they would have gotten in touch with me, I could have figured out what they were doing and solved their problem.

In that case, it would have eliminated bias by preventing an incorrect negative review. And helped resolve that person's issue.

Re: Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns

#23

Post by entropy_ » Mon, May 21, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

harrybr wrote: post #20

ouriel wrote: post #17

Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire Thanks for the comments and interesting conversation. Here is a comment i just posted to the author of the post. I hope it brings some light on the situation. ==================================== i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster. First off App booster is a dialog system between the developer and the user. It includes a among other elements a simp…

Article author here. It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing. However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic (diagram from article): http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2012... After a user su…

Well, if an app author is going to go the extra mile and write a mechanism to complement apple's deficient review system, you can't really ask them to be neutral while doing so. Think about it for a second, how could they have done it differently? The only viable option is to remove the link to leaving a review after the positive feedback and that's removing functionality(If I found an app useful I want to help the developer by leaving a positive review). I can't really blame anyone for not adding a link to leaving a review after the user has given negative feedback, I definitely wouldn't to it.

Furthermore, I don't use iOS, but if review patterns are similar to those on Android(and I can't really see why they wouldn't be) then I can really see where the app's author is coming from. Most negative reviews I've seen(especially on actually good apps) have been things like "1-star doesn't work!" in a sea of "5-star awesome app!". You can hardly blame a developer for wanting to know how it "doesn't work" instead of just getting a vague review that doesn't explain anything.

Re: Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns

#24

Post by ouriel » Tue, May 22, 2012, 6:19 AM UTC

harrybr wrote: post #20

ouriel wrote: post #17

Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire Thanks for the comments and interesting conversation. Here is a comment i just posted to the author of the post. I hope it brings some light on the situation. ==================================== i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster. First off App booster is a dialog system between the developer and the user. It includes a among other elements a simp…

Article author here. It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing. However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic (diagram from article): http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2012... After a user su…

Harry calling our approach "Dark pattern" is probably far streched. Appsfire App booster is a dialog system and the feedback system is built to give the developer a chance to answer the user before he s goes public about his review. This is in our mind way better than the current practice in the app store. If you want to look at Dark Patterns consider paid review/ratings systems, incentivized ratings systems many apps have built in, or simply abusive intrusive popups breaking the user experience that will probably lead to unjustified negative reviews in the app store.