
On the Emotion of Users in App Review - martensd
https://medium.com/@mrtnsd/so-you-created-the-best-app-ever-27699b191f23#.om2wcotzp
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MisterKent
A slightly related note is that UI's are trending "dumber". More and more apps
and websites I see are adding all this padding around things creating wasted
space.

Once upon a time, someone figured out cramping everything together looked bad
so they started adding more and more padding. Now it feels like I'm being
treated like an infant who couldn't handle that many words on the screen and
needs these playful distracting colors everywhere.

It seems like the power users that prefer denser interfaces are being ignored.
And now, the users are starting to catch on that even though at first glance
these apps are prettier they reduce productivity by showing less information,
reducing features that confuse users, hiding buttons away, and having non-
discoverable gestures.

I would love to see this dataset aimed at the switching of UIs to material
design. A fair number of my apps have made the switch, and I've always been
disappointed by the results.

~~~
lcw
It's funny I feel the same way. For instance, there has been a huge movement
in EComm web applications to make checkouts more of a wizard flow. I always
liked it when everything was on one page and I could just tab through forms,
and not click on 10 next buttons.

I get that it lowers the amount of customer service issues with checkout
because it can baby people through the process. They are missing the other
side of the problem though, which is, it most definitely slows down the
checkout process for people that know what they are doing. Also with the
advent of auto fill utils it seems like a backwards approach or at least
something that we will reverse once people become more familiar with auto fill
capabilities.

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et-al
Wow, I'm glad they brought up the iOS Gmail app redesign as an example. It
took the Gmail team 7-8 releases over a 3 month period to finally restore
functionality, but the app is still a user experience eyesore despite all the
praise for Material Design. If you're changing the color scheme of an app
people use every day, don't make it BRIGHT RED. Otherwise you receive
reactions like this:

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/V5muFb9...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/V5muFb9W5bA)

If anyone is looking for an alternative, I'd recommend AirMail, or try using
Charles Proxy and forcing iTunes to download Gmail 4.4 (the
softwareVersionExternalIdentifier you'll want is 815948715).

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MasterScrat
Interesting, but after you said "we processed 7+ million app reviews" I was
really expecting deeper insights.

This is a super exciting data set and I hope you can get more out of it: is it
actually worth it to prioritize the features people are asking for? how long
does it take to recover from a drop, can this be modeled somehow? how come
some apps receive inconsistent emotion? etc

~~~
martensd
Thanks for your comment, MasterScrat. These are good points, actually our
results are preliminary. As we consider this topic to be helpful for
developers, we aim to further analyze the data.

I would be very happy to receive more replies like yours to come up with new
ideas and different perspectives on how to look at the data, and to prioritize
which questions to answer.

~~~
jhurliman
\- I assume sentiment and star ratings are strongly correlated, but are there
cases where these deviate?

\- Is there any seasonality to review volume and/or sentiment (day of week,
time of month/year/etc) that holds across many apps?

\- Are there interesting differences in sentiment mean+variance by app
category? For example, are utility app reviews more polarized than games?

~~~
MasterScrat
> \- I assume sentiment and star ratings are strongly correlated, but are
> there cases where these deviate?

> \- Are there interesting differences in sentiment mean+variance by app
> category? For example, are utility app reviews more polarized than games?

These are answered in the white paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02256.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02256.pdf)

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mnm1
The obvious point they should have learned from this data is to not change the
UI unnecessarily. Sadly, they missed the elephant in the room.

~~~
dredmorbius
jwz nailed this a ways back:

 _The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which
means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit
has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily
doing before. This does not often happen with Safari. Their UI has been
remarkably stable for many, many years._

 _The constantly-changing Firefox UI is by design. They believe that user-
experience bugs are just like all other bugs, and you can manage them in the
same way: toss them into Bugzilla and "more eyes make all bugs shallow", etc.
(Google takes this even further: all of their UI decisions are made
statistically.) Apple doesn't believe that, and they develop their UI in
dictatorial secrecy._

 _Here 's a 50-minute talk by Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Mozilla,
about how they do UI and why they think they should do it that way. It's
interesting._

 _Maybe the Firefox team is right, and you can develop a better UI that way.
Well, they haven 't yet proved this, because Apple's UI is better._

 _Look, in the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release
early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history
has proven that UI is different than software. The Firefox crew believe
otherwise. Good for them, and we'll see._

 _Meanwhile, I 'm going to use the app whose UI works best, not the app whose
development methodology most fits my political preconceptions._

If you read the soure, note that Jamie plays games with HN referrers. You may
want to copy/paste this instead, hence the non-link.

    
    
        https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/

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cpncrunch
Title is incorrect and nonsensical. Should be reviews rather than review, as
per the article.

