Nobody likes receiving a negative review for their app. However, instead of taking these negative reviews personally or going into a negative emotional spiral, you should think of these negative reviews in terms of user feedback.
User feedback is an essential part of learning and growing your business. Use your app’s negative reviews to make your app stronger. Remember that every day is a fresh day for your app and a new opportunity.
Here are a few crucial ways in which negative app reviews can help you.
Table of Contents
Helping The Debugging Process
Bugs occur in any kind of software. Even the most careful developers and the most extensive debugging campaigns can leave a few bugs that escape the net. Once your app is out into the world, users will almost inevitably find bugs with the app.
Hopefully, these users will tell you about the bug in the form of a negative review. When you come across such a review, you should be quick to respond. Tell the user that you are working on solving the bug, and then actually do it. Users will appreciate that their comments have been taken into account, and your app will be better for it.
Helping Improve User Interface
Another common issue that users have with an app is that the user interface is hard to understand or counter-intuitive. Since apps are made by developers, they have a different perspective of looking at a user interface than an actual user.
Use these negative comments as a reason to constantly work on the user interface of your app. You will notice that even the most successful apps are always reworking their user interface. This is because the user interface is one of those things that is never perfect.
Since there is always room for improvement, your goal should be to use user feedback in your efforts to make the UI of your app better.
Helping Improve Functionality
If you find several comments that say “this doesn’t work,” then you know that there is a problem with the functionality of your app. You should try to get in touch with these users and ask them specific questions relating to the problem they are facing. This will help you identify problems with your app.
In the development process, you may have missed a crucial aspect of your app’s functionality, or it may just be that the user wishes the app had more functions. Either way, comments like these are a great stepping-stone to improve your app’s performance.
Helping Improve User Experience
The user experience is a hard aspect to get right. It veers more towards being art than science. This is why negative reviews that discuss the user experience are so important. Instead of dismissing these comments as being facetious, you should carefully consider the insight you gain from such comments.
Taking these comments into account can be a game-changer when you decide to revamp your app in the next rollout.
Helping With Business Principles
Sometimes users will object to your app due to their principles. For example, if you have a food-reviewing app that reviews a lot of meat-based food options, it can be offensive to a vegan. It is important that you do not alienate these users.
Your goal should be to make your app as inclusive as possible. Hence, in the above example, you should attempt to add more vegan food reviews to your app. And make sure that you tell the user about them. This could really help spread the word about your app.
Helping Assess The Competition
Users will sometimes criticize your app, saying that it is not as good as a competitor’s app. In such cases, you need to analyze your competitor’s app to ascertain in what way they are better.
Such an analysis can lead to newfound insights. Use these insights to make overarching or specific changes to your app, which ensure that you will never receive such negative feedback in the future.
Helping Predict Future Needs
Negative app reviews can be a gold mine in terms of coming up with new features for your app. Users have a way of identifying lacking features in a way that developers just don’t.
The users may directly identify a feature that they need or identify a need that should be solved. Either way, this can give you valuable insight into which features to work on next for your app. A website like appreviews.ninja can help you make sense of such reviews.
Helping Improve General Impression
Sometimes a user will simply not like your app, and they will let you know in no uncertain terms. It may seem that you cannot do anything about such reviews, but you can. These kinds of comments are usually a result of the general impression that your app creates in a user’s mind.
Hence, you should analyze the general impression of your app in order to make it more intuitive and target a wider user base.
Helping Improve Branding
Branding issues can be common for an app. Sometimes users will simply not like the name of your app or the logo. If you receive a lot of comments that are related to your app’s brand, then it may be time for you to upgrade your branding game.
Get professional help in terms of how to make your brand most suitable for your business and your app.
Helping Refine Customer Support
Customer support can be a pain point for the majority of app users. Unhelpful or unresponsive customer support can quickly eat into your existing user base. Nothing turns a regular user against your app like bad customer support.
You should take these types of customer reviews very seriously and use their feedback to improve the customer support that your app provides.
