Friday 24 February 2012

How to Ask Users to Rate Your App?


The way Google's Android Market (or any other app store) arranges apps in the top listing is not well known outside the staff. It is a good thing too. Knowing the exact algorithms would allow dishonest manipulation of the system. Regardless, we all want our own apps to be up high in the listing for them to reach as many users as possible. We cannot affect the algorithm and we should not try to game the system. The best thing we can do is to try to get our user to rate our apps. Positive ratings is definitely a factor when the system orders the apps in the listing.


Don't Be an As#@(&$
There have been few disgracious attempts by dishonest and usually malicious software vendors to force users to rate their apps by claiming that the app remains locked until the user rates it for 5 stars (technically this isn't even possible). Fortunately, these apps have been swiftly removedly from the market by Google. 

But what can we do to encourage users to rate our apps without going to extremes and dishonest behavior like the one mentioned above?


Users Almost Never Rate Apps
Getting apps rated is important and users don't do it that often. There's a good reason why only very few users ever rate an app. Rating is done in the Market Place app (or on the website). Both of these are used for installing apps and aren't very useful after that. People very rarely go back to the Market Place just to rate an app.

Facebook app, for example, has between 100.000.000 and 500.000.000 downloads but only little bit more than 2.600.000 ratings. Less than 2% of all Facebook app users have rated the app. 


The situation is even worse than it sounds. When are we most likely to give feedback about things? It is when they fail. Let's face it. We like to complain when things go wrong. While I don't think there's anything wrong about raising concerns when things aren't working it can distort the public perception of app quality if a small minority of people who encounter problems leave feedback.


So, What Can We Do?
The importance of ratings and lack of user participation has caused some app developers to look for solutions. One that we've all probably run into is the infamous "Rate our app!" pop-up dialog. My opinion about pop-up, including this one, can be read from my earlier post about them. In short, I strongly oppose use of pop-ups. Default position should always be not to use them and only if no other alternative exist with reasonable amount of work use of pop-ups should be considered.

Pop-ups are annoying by default. Making users annoyed while asking them to rate your app doesn't sound smart. They don't even seem to be that effective. Let's look at another example. Evernote used a pop-up asking for rating of the app (I haven't seen it for a while so I hope that they've removed it). So let's see how Evernote does with rating percentage. They have 10.000.000 to 50.000.000 installs and just over 240.000 ratings. Interestingly it works out to pretty much exactly same rating percentage. 



This very unscientific comparison of two apps in the market and their percentages doesn't, of course, prove anything. I do maintain my original point about avoiding pop-ups however. Pop-ups being bad doesn't mean that that there isn't anything that could be done to guide users towards reviewing your app.


Gentle Push Without Interruption
If you want to ask your users to review your app make it as discretely as possible. Do not block or interrupt your users' workflow with a pop-up. 

Here are two alternatives you could consider. They are by far not the only options but examples of solutions that solve the same problem but don't involve pop-ups.
  1. Are you using dashboard UI pattern? If so you could consider using the dashboard's information area to display a message about rating.
  2. Does your app show ads? If so you cold consider replacing the add with a rating request sometimes. 

In addition to not blocking the users there are few things that you should keep in mind when asking of users to rate your app.
  1. Always provide an easy way for users to say "no, I won't and never ask me again" (which also applies in situations where user has already rated the app)
  2. If user rates your app or expresses that he or she doesn't want to rate it make your app remember it. Never ask them again. If your app has user account try store that information to the user account so whenever they reinstall or install the app on another device they won't be asked again. 

Conclusion
Getting your app rated is important. It isn't an excuse for bad user experience though. Before resorting to pop-ups think about other solutions. While they aren't always obvious they very rarely don't exist.



11 comments:

  1. Is there a way to link directly to the market "submit rating" for your app? Maybe a simple button on the app's main screen could help bring in a few ratings.

    It's not long since I submitted my first app to the Android Market, but it's nearing 1k downloads and nearly 500 active installs. I have 5 ratings and 3 comments.

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  2. I have noticed ratings dive for the past few months. I used to get 2 or 3 a day. Now I get that a week. I personally think its the market interface. Since we lost the tabbed interface rating is a pain. Putting everything on one scrolling list is a poor experience.

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  3. At some point I had a "Rate App" button in the Preference screen of my app, which is as unobstrusive as it gets, yet very visible. App never ever opened a popup which IMHO should never be done by any app. Neither did it asked for a favorable rating when user clicked the "Rate app" button.

    I worked great initially to have lots of ratings. But it went both ways with bad and good ratings/comments. At some point I got so fed about some comments idiocy that I removed that button. Rating frequency dropped by a factor of 3 or 4 immediately.

    Now I still get about the same ratio of good/bad ratings than before, but I get to read 4x less idiocy which is better for my own sanity, but still too much.

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  4. You raise some very true points.
    I am planning to run rating requests through ads soon :)

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  5. Great take on the ratings issue, thanks for sharing it. I think you're right, a lot of the people out there are doing ratings in a way that annoys people and isn't very constructive. That said, to say that prompting people to rate your app isn't effective in driving volume is off the mark. We've worked with hundreds of developers and talked to even more about prompting for ratings and no matter how it's done, it always leads to a volume increase, as Anonymous discusses above.

    Imagine that instead of just prompting the person using your app you took the opportunity to first learn about their experience and were focused on learning how to make them happier. Would that be something better? What if you were able to track every interaction with your rating prompt and you could understand if most people who saw it were happy? Would that make you feel more comfortable with the prompts?

    At Apptentive, one of the things we do is to help developers be more focused on the people using their apps, even in the ratings process. We think that our approach is more friendly and focused on the experience of your app's customers. This blog post talks about our philosophy in a bit more depth, we'd love your take on things: http://blog.apptentive.com/customer-communication/better-ratings-for-your-applications/

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  6. Hey Robi,

    Thank you for sharing your experience and information. You bring up interesting points. I'm still fundamentally opposed of any prompts if there are other ways to achieve the same thing. To me a pop-up always implies that the designers / devs gave up thinking about the problem and went for the easy and interruptive solution (which can be justified in some cases). I believe that if you're able to create a system where users are happy with a prompt you could always find even a better solution by implementing a non-interrupting way to do the same.

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  7. Does anybody know if there's a way to find out what rating your users gave? I have these awful trolls who keep 1-staring my app everyday so that their comments continually appear first, they say they will uninstall but next day it's the exact same thing.

    It is beyond frustrating, especially as Google gives us no means to respond to such comments. I'd love to be able to uninstall my app from users who give 1-star, so they no longer benefit from having my app. Can this be done? I'm so upset.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, there is no way to know if user has rated the app nor to get the rating and that is good. Devs could abuse system by only letting users use an app if they rate it or if they rate it 5*.

      Google has introduced comment reply system. The new system went live to all developers today. Just enable the new publisher console and you find reply button in the comment section.

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  8. When sending the user to a URL, don't send them to the Google Play URL where they are forced to log in via a webpage. You can instead send them to: market://details?id=Your.App.ID

    We use an URL with the market:// prefix. More specifically:

    Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
    intent.setData(Uri.parse("market://details?id=" +
    getActivity().getPackageName())); getActivity().startActivity(intent);

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    Replies
    1. That's not true. A normal market URL sent via intent will open the play app as well.

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