This blog post is on the app ratings and review systems on Apple iTunes, Google Play and Amazon App Store. All three of these stores provide a 5 star rating scale and a text review (title + body text).
The problems I see with the current review/rating systems are as follows:
- Single score doesn’t communicate in much depth what the reviewer is trying to say
- Single scores don’t benefit content discovery
- Review text is unstructured
To improve upon the existing rating/review system, it's worth considering:
- what the reviewers are trying to communicate
- who the reviewers are communicating to
- of that which is being communicated, which is the most important
What reviews/ratings are trying to communicate:
- Quality
- Look and feel / graphics
- Features
- Bugs
- Extent of recommendation
- Value for money
- Ideas for the app / ideas for derivative apps
- That there is / isn’t a market for future apps of this type
Who reviews/ratings are trying to communicate to:
- Other potential customers
- Developer
- Other developers
- The App Stores (typically to complain about an app)
What is most important:
- For me, the most important thing that reviewers are communicating is the extend of recommendation
Suggestions for a better system
Each review would have the following sections:- Message to the developer (private)
- Over-all rating (5 star scale)
- Over-all review
- Set of recommendations (see below)
Three-variable recommendation system:
- Who the recommendation is for (tag-like system, when the user starts to type the name of a group, they're shown options to pick from) (e.g. fans of X)
- Why you're recommending it / What you think they’ll get out of it
- How much you're recommending it
Users would be able to follow recommendations streams to help them find new content.
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