Find feature requests and bugs in app store reviews, automagically.
Pushing a new update is often pretty nerve-wracking stuff. Do users care if you remove that feature that is the least-used in your navigation? Will they like the new thing (which your company thinks is awesome) that you’ve replaced it with?
Anyone who has been in the app game a little while will have made a decision that made their users cranky, if not outraged. Are most of your users (or just a noisy few) upset though? Human brains are wired to place increased importance on the feedback we read most recently, not the most often, and this makes it pretty hard to stay objective.
Likewise when you’ve built something that users are really loving. The signs might all be positive — increasing star rating, lots of social shares and so forth — but where do you get data that proves exactly how much people loved it?
Then, after your latest update goes out, how can you easily work out what your users want you to build next? Getting feedback directly is hard though, so being able to harvest and rank feature requests based on your app reviews can save you hours.
We decided we wanted to do away with anecdotal evidence and answer these questions quickly, and irrefutably.
Feature removal blues: the reaction to removing Discover from Twitter
Users obviously felt pretty strongly about this, with 6.6% of reviewers mentioning it explicitly in the days after release. 87% of those were unhappy, 3% happy, leaving a balance of 10% neutral. Additionally the words “Please”, “Bring” and “Back” all appear in the top 10 most commonly used words and all have at least 74% negative sentiment.
More generic words like “Update” and “New” also have overwhelmingly negative sentiment in the reviews that contained them, painting quite a bleak picture for user perception of this new update. Is it really as bad as you think though? It’s certainly not as if 50% of users complained about the same things, but it’s upwards of 12% which is still a significant number. Every company will have a different threshold of “too many upset users”, and this table allows you to see easily if you’re approaching it.
Will Twitter bring Discover back? Only time will tell :)
The proof: Commbank users
Touch ID
Commonwealth Bank, one of the largest Australian retail banks, launched a new version of their iOS app, Commbank, earlier this month. The key feature of the update was support for Touch ID. Clearly, the Commbank team have been listening closely to their user base. If we look at a 30 day period prior to the update, the popular words look like this:
“Touch” is the 21st most commonly mentioned word in the reviews during this period. It comes up in almost 11% of the total reviews, offering a strong clue to the Commbank team that this is a feature users were interested in, even though the same users are positive (73%) or neutral (20%) about the app. Here’s what we saw when we drilled into the reviews that mentioned “Touch”:
Awesome. So, what happened when they added Touch ID support?
A bit of a love-in :)
94% of reviews that mentioned the addition of Touch ID were positive, and 67% of the reviews overall contained the word “Touch”. Check out what users has to say:
Nice one, Commbank — you’re obviously listening.
What next? How about Apple Watch support…
In this age of Lean Startup the vast majority of companies we know like to think their roadmap is very customer driven.
Aggregating customer feedback is often time-consuming and challenging though, and I know we’ve been guilty of building the thing we’ve spoken to a customer about yesterday, rather than the thing 100 people have asked for in total over the last 6 months.
It doesn’t have to be that way if you’ve got some tools to help. Below is the Popular Words table for another Appbot user’s app, with a short date range over the past 10 days or so. The date range coincides with the timing of large numbers of people getting their shiny new Apple Watches in the mail… and the results are pretty incredible.
You get to kill two birds with one stone with this information: build the thing people really want, and hopefully turn around the sentiment attached to those reviews from 60% negative to 60+% positive. Happy days :)
You can get this data for your own (and your competitors) apps in minutes.
All you need is an Appbot account (you get 14 days for nada!). Sign up, add your apps, and we’ll nip off to fetch your reviews. Then head to the Sentiment Dashboard, and voila, happy roadmapping!
