Two weeks ago we unveiled a new design for the summary page; this past week we extended that new look to include the reviews page. Along the way we also threw in one new feature and kicked usability up a notch. Let’s dive in…
Skin Deep
The new summary page took a big step forward in presenting project information in a clean, well-structured, good-looking manner. Since that information included new visual treatments for reviews, we want to make sure our visitors were seeing the same things on the reviews page that they’d just seen on the summary page. Consistency, consistency, consistency.
Review Filtering
While user testing the new summary page, we asked our testers 1) if they were able to find all the information they needed to make a decision about downloading and 2) what that information was. Some of our testers were so interested in reviews that they clicked through to the reviews page, providing us with information about how visitors use reviews. Even though the project was highly reviewed, they still wanted an easy way to filter down to just negative reviews (more on that in a moment). Consequently we’ve added a filtering option to both the summary (where we show the top three reviews) and the reviews page.
Ratings, Reviews, and Abuse
Though we often call everything “reviews,” there are actually two types of feedback a visitor can provide to a project: ratings and reviews. The rating is just the thumbs up/down, while the review is the comments associated with the rating. About a year ago, we changed reviews to be logged-in users only, in response to concerns expressed by the community over negative reviews being submitted anonymously. At the same time, we wanted to keep it easy for everyone to provide some basic feedback, so anonymous users were still about to submit ratings. In order to curtail abuse, we beefed up anti-spam protection and provided developers with the ability to enable/disable reviews for their particular projects.
Nothing in the previous paragraph has changed with the redesign.
To be clear: the previous design allowed users to submit negative feedback. Reviews are still limited to logged in users, while anonymous users may submit ratings. We feel that this approach strikes a good balance between easy-to-use for consumers and the concerns expressed by our community of developers. What has changed is that we’re providing a little more prominence to the ratings, by displaying a bar graph of negative vs. positive ratings along with a “percent recommended.”
There are three main reasons for the change:
- Displaying the total number of reviews provides consumers with important context. Knowing that 1,456 people like a project works best when you know that that’s also 96% (or 39%) of all ratings.
- We’ve seen our anti-spam measures work to prevent abuse. We recently had a developer report that a user was attempting to submit several hundred negative ratings. When we checked into issue, we found that the user had simply submitted one negative rating; all the rest were wasted effort. Like any security system, our protection can be circumvented by a determined attacker, but that brings us to the next reason…
- With app stores popping up left and right, consumers are quickly becoming sophisticated about their expectations with regards to ratings and reviews. Every app store has some sort of rate/review system, along with sites like Yelp or Amazon. Consequently consumers expect and look for both positive and negative reviews. Furthermore they’re quite good at sifting through the reviews, ignoring the false and pulling out the most helpful information.
Talk To Us
Times are changing and we’re changing with them: reviews, both good and bad, are now a crucial part of the decision-making process for downloading software.
At the same time we’ll make every effort to protect projects from abuse and listen to community feedback.
We will continue to fine tune our reviews, as well as the surrounding policies and procedures, as we continue to balance the various needs of all of our users (developers and consumers). If you’d like to join the discussion, leave a comment below or get ahold of us through one of the support venues.