Human beings are delightfully creative, and you never know how people might use a product out in the wild.ĭid you know that Play-Doh was originally designed to be a wallpaper cleaner? But then at some point, the creators discovered that some people were using the product for art projects. We wouldn’t have done this if it hadn’t been for these app reviews. After working out some kinks in our process, I’m happy to say we now write release notes for every iOS and Android release.
Hundreds of people gave us 1-star reviews just because of our release notes. That’s more than one in every ten reviews!įor months, we kept getting gems like this: After we stopped writing release notes, 12% of reviewers complained about our generic release notes. You might be thinking, “Who the heck reads release notes anyway?” Well, it turns out a lot of people do. Instead, we used a generic message about how we “regularly release updates.” Although we wanted to write release notes, there were a bunch of internal reasons that made it difficult for us to keep writing them. People want to be heard, and giving a 1-star or 5-star rating adds oomph to your opinion.Ī little over a year ago, we stopped writing release notes for our iOS and Android apps.
Why is it that people tend to give extreme ratings? There are a few theories that try to explain extreme responding, but I like to think that people on the internet are just passionate about voicing their opinions. Over two-thirds of reviewers either loved or hated our app. To give you a taste, here’s a small sample of the reviews we got:Īfter crunching the numbers, I found that over 70% of our app reviews were either 5-star or 1-star reviews. As I scrolled from review to review, I noticed people using a whole lot of superlatives-words like most, best, and worst popped up again and again. The first thing that jumped out at me while reading these reviews was that people had such strong opinions about our app. I learned new things about our users that I never would’ve learned otherwise.Ĭurious to know what I learned? Below are some of my biggest takeaways from reading these reviews. Looking back at this experience, I have to say it was incredibly humbling. I wanted to read their actual words - tirades, triumphs, and all. I wanted to hear from people across the globe. Yes, we run user studies at Dropbox, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to learn more about our users and what they thought about our product. Why in the world would anyone read so many app reviews? Well, I was on a mission.
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