actively asking users to rate an app they have downloaded may lead to better ratings
Re:Google Play Store Ratings Drop
by fauigerzigerk on Friday January 24, 2014 @05:34AM
(#7114241)
>But it's not asking them to rate the app, it's asking them to rate the suggestion.
No, if this is really the UI in question then it is not asking users to rate the suggestion: http://blog.testfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/quick_s...
It's clearly asking users to rate one app to get suggestions for other apps.
Sadly, many users just don't read past the title.
And users familiar with other suggestion engines (pandora, etc) expect to teach the system their taste and relevance.
Re:Google Play Store Ratings Drop
by magicalist on Friday January 24, 2014 @05:05AM
(#7114167)
It would also help if the graphs in the post started at 0 stars on the y-axis, because the drops look much more severe than they really are.
I imagine in an ultra-competitive niche that the drop in the third graph from 4.72 to 4.54 could be a painful drop, but the first graph has a drop of .03 stars, and the second is a drop of .05 stars. Perfectly in line with a very slight adjustment (though I'm sure it's alarming when you first notice it happening).
To be fair, the graph formatting doesn't look like the author's fault, just the analytics page automatically zooms and crops like that.
User ratings greatly suffer from self selection bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias). Asking users who didn't initially rate an app do so as part of some other workflow might reduce that bias a little bit.
That said, I'm very distrustful of user ratings in general, both as a developer and as a consumer, because people often rate stuff based on criteria that don't concern me at all.