TL;DR Does asking users for feedback and ratings help in your app? Yes!
When I joined Singapore Press Holdings in late 2015, most of the apps published were receiving low ratings and bad reviews. As I was working in the Chinese media mobile application team, I proposed a method to collect reviews and encourage users to give ratings. We tested the implementation in the zaobao.sg app (the flagship Chinese language news and videos app).
After rolling out the new functionality, the reviews and ratings in the Google Play Store doubled. Most of the reviews received were very helpful for the team, as they shed light on how we could improve the product.
From the screenshot below, you could see that there was a huge surge of reviews, and ratings increased by 10% after the implementation was added in February 2017. The average number of reviews increased beyond 100%.
Additionally, we also received feedback from anonymous users who did not wish to put their reviews in Google Play Store as well.
How did we implement it?
Before the implementation, we used to have a feedback page like this:
While it did receive some responses from users, I felt that it was not significant enough. The users who sent feedback via the Settings page was either a hardcore user who love your app or probably a subscriber who was going to complain about something >.<
Be proactive. Prod the user for feedback in the app!
We targeted users who had installed the app for over a certain period of time and consumed a lot of contents. We thought these users would be potential feedback providers. You would also have to think what are the best criteria to determine a potential user of your app, as it depends on the uses of your app.
In our case, since we were working on a news app, we expected the user to open and consume it on a daily basis. Also, some users may uninstall the app after a short period of usage. (On that note, it would be helpful if Google Play Store allows app developers to collect users’ feedback upon un-installation) Therefore we could only target users who continued to use the app. We wanted to know the reasons why they continued to use the app, and what motivations or goals made them continue to use the app etc.
Hence, we just asked: ”Enjoy the app?” (Enjoy my article? LoL)
Our prompt only had a ”Yes” and ”No” option, with no other way to dismiss the “annoying” question. Selecting an option will lead to the next dialog box:
If the user answered ”Yes”, we would ask them a favour to give the app a rating on the Google Play Store. Some helpful users did give some useful suggestions besides rating the app.
If the user answered ”No”, we would appeal for their feedback so that we could improve the app. This would be the opportunity you could receive helpful feedback from the user.
We found that this technique had helped us tremendously. You might have seen similar patterns and prompts in some apps in the market too. This could perhaps become the trend or M.E.T.A in harnessing user feedback for product improvements!
Hope our discovery will help in your application development journey :)
Original post by Winson Tan at here.