Feedback Systems need to be both ways: the Chrome Extension store needs an update
October 29th, 2012 2 minute read
Have you ever left a bad review? Sometimes a product doesn’t work well or you had a bad experience at a venue? A ton of us do it, because we want to have our complaints heard, partially to vent your own frustrations and partially to help others avoid your same frustrations. People read and judge on reviews and star ratings, amazon and yelp are two great examples where reviews matter a LOT, if you have really bad reviews on either of those sites, it’s probably costly.
There’s another important part of this review system though, and that’s the part where the business owner / seller gets to respond back. I think very positively when owners on Yelp respond to criticism on the site, it shows that they care about the feedback they are getting and it’s a way of addressing the concerns and issues of their own customers. I’ve left bad reviews and owners have reached out to me to address complaints or explain why somethings are the way they are.
Sometimes these bad reviews are misunderstandings, I’ve ordered ribs from a place and they came cold! I complained and I found out apparently they are served cold, it’s a style of ribs that the place has. I then updated my review to reflect that change and shelved my complaints about the temperature.
There’s one review system that I despise now and that’s the Google Chrome Extension Store.
I wrote an extension on the store to let you add facebook events to your google calendar, I was frustrated with the export feature on Facebook only allowing you to either it yourself or download an ICS file, both which require extra steps in order to get them on google calendar. There was actually an extension that already did it, but it proved unstable and was broken for months when the Facebook event layout changed, so I built one that work with the Facebook Graph API. I believe it’s a bit more robust and less prone to breakage.
I put it up on the store and I got users (I have to admit, having random people use your app is a great feeling) and I even got some good reviews!
Then I got some feedback and bad reviews, one user was complaining about the fact that she couldn’t find and install the app, wait what? Apparently I miscommunicated in my description of the extension and people thought they needed to install the app on facebook, which they don’t. It will ask for an authorization request the first them they use the feature, but guess what? I have no freaking clue to tell them that. I spent a while trying to find out if I can respond to the user, I went to their Google+ profile and I have no way of messaging them, there’s no point of contact in order for the developer to address the concerns of the user. It was an incredibly frustrating experience overall.
My extension only has 700 some users, but if somebody was really building something that was going to be used by a lot of people I imagine this lack of feedback would be incredibly frustrating. Thankfully the small change that I needed to make was obvious and the reviews pointed that out but I imagine some reviews are more vague or confusing on how to solve and would require help from the users.
This is a serious concern with any type of review system, the chrome extension store is just one example but the Apple App Store and Google Play Store have the same damn problem. Reviews are great for the users but without any tools for the developer to address and contact these frustrated users, what’s the point?