Idiot or a frustrated 70 year old coming into contact with a smartphone for the first time?
Idiot, or a person with ADHD who has trouble focusing on the instructions and just wants to use the app intuitively?
Idiot, or person whose first language isn't English?
Idiot, or person with an IQ of 85. Yes, you might call someone like that an "idiot", but that's first of all nasty to say, and is that justified if they're part of your target audience? You have to design for these people.
Idiot, or person who's completely stressed the fuck out who just wants to use your app for what it's meant for and not spend a single second more?
Idiot, or drunk person who wants to order food/have fun/order stuff online because it is incredibly important to order that right now?
Idiot, or someone who just isn't very interested in techonology whatsoever and just uses a phone to keep up-to-date with friends and does some banking? You'd be surprised at how many people don't know what a zip file is, who don't know what USB is, who don't know if a GB is larger than a KB or not?
Unfortunately, these type of reviews where people post completely irrelevant complaints are quite common (see the number of people reviewing their local post office in Amazon reviews), but I do wish platforms would remove them.
They don't bother me as much as the Amazon ones you bring up though. I swear the majority of negative reviews I see on there are people complaining that the product never shipped or that the shipping service damaged it. There's so many of them that on Amazon that it can be nearly impossible to find reviews that actually say negatives about the product. Tends to end up being better to find a trusted professional reviewer and if they haven't reviewed what you're looking at, just skip it in favor of something they have reviewed.
It reminds me of when I did tech support in college. Everybody who walked in or called was a real person trying to get real things done. If they knew as much about computers as me, they wouldn't have been walking in. So I learned to accept them as they were and do my best to help them. I didn't get to choose who walked in.
I think it's the same deal with putting an app in an app store. Well over 80% of America has a smartphone at this point. If a dev really wants to restrict their market to some narrow demographic, it's on them to do the work of countering the context, which sets the entry criteria somewhere around "has at least one eye and one finger". That means very clear marketing, design, and interface choices to make it clear to people they're in the wrong place before they've invested enough time that they feel writing a review is merited.
There are lots of bad reviews on Amazon, because of shipping. People leave one star reviews only (I know because they say so, in the review) because their stuff came a day later than they expected. How is the product creator responsible for shipping delays by the carrier or by the Amazon warehouse?
The reality is that online shoppers are impatient, have unrealistic expectations and do not read the product description. Not all, but enough to be a concern and enough to affect a product's ratings. There are lots of bad products on Amazon. But there are also lots of bad behavior from shoppers too. I don't know if this is true with other online stores, but with Amazon I have seen this often
Yes, UX is important, yes be patient with people who might not get it at the first time, but I see situations like:
- Your app is very specific and it shouldn't be used by people outside a certain domain field. Then some idiot downloads it and gives 1 star because he can't figure it out. This is the kind of person that calls traditional sphygmomanometers "dumb".
- If you build a more idiot proof system the world comes up with a better idiot. I've seen reviews on Amazon complaining that a certain size of item was "small". Conveniently the review indicated the chosen size and guess which one was it between multiple sizes? (The smallest one of course)
Amen to all this. People need to stop being elitists, and assuming that other people love and care about technology as much as them, or even that everyone is always capable (as you mentioned, low IQ or mental health can be a real problem for some users).
I recently saw a comment on other thread: What people need to understand about good design: If you need to explain to people how to use your product the "right" way, it’s probably a badly designed product.
>idiots
>embarrassing themselves
>pisses me off
>obviously idiots
This attitude toward users - regardless of whether your assessment that the source of the problem is intelligence is correct - is poisonous noise that creates far more problems than it solves. Also, the hostility reduces the quality of discourse.
1. While aggressive, they do have meaning, and aren't meant only for their tone. E.g. "poisonous" is meant to confer that the attitude spreads, and harms discussion. "Noise" is meant in the sense of "signal vs noise". In "creates more problems than it solves", the problems we're trying to solve are the very subject of the comments, whatever they may be in each case, and the problems created are the fallout in discussion. I should have elaborated.
2. The tone they impart was chosen to be commensurate with the behavior they are criticizing and its practical consequences. If I were to be more polite, I could have used a tone like, "I think your choice of words distracts the conversation," but I don't think that communicates my opinion as clearly. Yes, there is a fine line between being honest and being insulting, and I am unhappy if it came across as patronizing, but sometimes it's hard to find that line.
I accept that it's a possibility that my words were uncalled-for (based only on your comment), but they also weren't just expressions of annoyance that I was reaching for arbitrarily. I feel like they aren't comparable to the tone of the post I was criticizing, neither in their severity nor in their meaning.
And the reason users write "app doesn't work" instead of giving a complete description of the bug because app stores have a word limit on reviews. Even your rant here will cross the word limit of Google Play reviews.
And it's not like every dev behaves like they are intelligent either, most devs have a reply bot that tells people with negative reviews to check their internet.
Absolute ratings don’t matter as much as inter-industry ratings anyways.
Your comment is one of those