Category Archives: Philosophical

Choices And Consequences

Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores employ a crude system of ratings and reviews that nonetheless has an impact on how marketable an app is, and accordingly, how much money it brings in.

Since very early in the history of these stores, developers looking to raise the average “star rating” on their apps, and to garner gushing words of praise in their reviews, have dealt with a conundrum: users do not typically review apps unless angered or … encouraged.

So developers have encouraged users to review their apps, using techniques that span a spectrum from what most users would consider harmless, to tactics that even the most naive users recognize as badgering, condescending, and manipulative.

At the harmless end of the spectrum, you find gentle reminders on Twitter, links in the about boxes of apps, and earnest pleas in the signature footer of email correspondence. These are not a huge deal to most people, and are usually phrased in a way that extracts empathy and a sense of obligation from passionate users: “We know it takes time and effort to review an app, but if you value our work please consider leaving a positive review. It means a lot. Thank you!”

At the other end, you find blatant harassment and tricky language meant to confuse users into capitulating. Modal alert panels might interrupt a user’s workflow at inopportune times, demanding that they either leave a review now or be reminded later to do so. The natural reaction of any user in this situation would be to try to determine which series of hoops must be jumped through to get the app to leave one friggin’ alone!

Recently John Gruber addressed the problem of apps on the badgering end of the spectrum, and merely hinted at a grass-roots campaign that might make a dent in the problem:

I’ve long considered a public campaign against this particular practice, wherein I’d encourage Daring Fireball readers, whenever they encounter these “Please rate this app” prompts, to go ahead and take the time to do it — but to rate the app with just one star and to leave a review along the lines of, “One star for annoying me with a prompt to review the app.”

Of course, by alluding to such a campaign in the plain view of hundreds of thousands of readers, Gruber may in fact have launched it. I witnessed many hoots of agreement among folks on Twitter, but also this more considerate reaction from Cabel Sasser of Panic:

That said, ‘give apps that do this 1 star’ suggestion bummed me out — stoops to the level of ‘1 star until you add X feature!’

Damn you, Cabel, and your empathetic rationality. There’s something to his call for civility and for taking the high road. On the other hand, damn it, too many developers have chosen the low road and users are entitled to react accordingly!

Probably the most uncomfortable aspect for me of this debate is that the temptation to … encourage users to write reviews and to rate software is completely rational. It makes perfect sense for us as developers to do everything we can to maximize the positive marketing of our apps.

But every choice in business comes with consequences, positive and negative. You implement a new feature that wows half your audience and increases sales among them by 10%, only to discover you’ve pissed off the other half and cut sales by 50% in their camp. It’s not fair or necessarily even rational. It’s just the mechanics of choices, reactions, and consequences.

Many developers cling tightly to the belief that because positive reviews can lead to increased sales, it’s unambiguously right to encourage more of them. And if producing a small number of reviews is a good thing, then producing a huge number of reviews must be a great thing. Mo’ reviews, mo’ money. What’s the problem?

The problem is that except to the least soulful among us, maximizing sales is not the only goal of writing software or developing a business. We need sales to keep ourselves and our families comfortable, but we need other things too. To many of us, these priorities are at least, if not more important than the specific need to make a living somehow:

  • The satisfaction that our customers are being treated well.
  • The ongoing support of customers for months and years to come.
  • The sense of pride in owning and stewarding a well-crafted product.

It’s smart to take it as given that something should be done to encourage users to leave positive ratings and reviews. That’s good business sense. But also take it as given that the farther you tread in the direction of badgering and disrespecting users, the more you chip away at the meaningful non-monetary benefits listed above.

If somebody like John Gruber incites your customers to rebel against the choices you’ve made in designing and marketing your product, take a step back before condemning him as the problem. Whether they knew it or not, your customers were already pissed at you before reading Gruber’s opinions. He’s only providing them with a context for expressing that rage. Take it as a wake up call and as an opportunity to re-evaluate your behavior before too many additional customers are moved to act.

Heavy-handed efforts to drum up reviews that produce a cash influx today might lead to unwanted consequences down the road. You might end up unsatisfied and ashamed that your otherwise brilliant app stoops to nagging and infuriating its users on a regular basis. And to top it all off, somebody like Gruber might light the match that sets them off revolting against you. It won’t be his fault, because the choices were yours all along. The consequences? Those are yours as well.

Instant Gratification

Technology consistently upgrades our standard of living, often in ways that we inevitably take for granted shortly after.

One of the best upgrades of the past few decades for so-called individual contributors like myself has been the extent to which we can now publish our work, receive feedback, and move forward in the process of perfecting our art. All within a few days or weeks rather than months or years.

In the old days, people like us worked in solitude or with the feedback of only a few confidants. A wider audience would evaluate the work only at major milestones: when a story was published, when an illustration was printed, or when a piece of software had passed through so many internal hoops and jumps that a publishing company agreed to release it to the open market.

These days, people who are confident they can do good work face one primary obstacle: the challenge of doing that good work. When the job is done, or even half-done, a dozen, hundreds, or thousands of eager constituents stand ready to judge it.

That’s terribly frightening and terribly enlivening. No more waiting for permission to share your thoughts, arts, or inventions with the world. And no more excuses for holding back. Got something to give? Put it out there and see what sticks.

Of course this freedom of expression comes at a cost: anybody can publish anything at any time. Most of it will be terrible, and much of it will be of lower quality than the highly-edited content of yesteryear. On the one hand, it encourages flippant blog posts like this, where perhaps the content should have gone through more than a ten-minute review process. On the other hand? Nobody with something profound to share should ever be silenced again.

The Integrity Prize

Alicia Liu paints a compelling picture of Salesforce as scoundrels, or at least oblivious, in their recent hackathon. They promised a $1M USD prize to whichever team of developers could present the “best” product submitted in compliance with the contest’s rules. The questions being raised have to do primarily with whether or not the rules were upheld.

Liu participated in the hackathon, and shares her first hand experiences of problems she observed. I learned about this story from Marco Arment, who points out that Salesforce will likely suffer a developer backlash from the airing of all this dirty laundry. It would be unfair to condemn a company based on the testimony of one participant, but her account reads authentic to me, and seems to be supported by comments on Hacker News. (I know, not the world’s most reliable source).

The most galling points to me from Liu’s report are:

  1. The winners of the contest seemed to be in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the rules.
  2. Multiple participants’ submissions seem to not even have been evaluated.

I believe that in general bending the rules is a valuable exercise. But when it comes to judged competition of any kind, whether it be on the sporting field, at the local trivia quiz, or in a $1M cash prize hackathon, a contest is only as good as its compliance with the rules. Any participant in the Salesforce event whose diligent, rule-abiding effort was either ignored completely or dismissed as inferior to the work of a rules-shirking participant, is right to be indignant about the outcome of the event. The rules of this contest, both the grandiose prize, and the significant surrender of IP rights required by the rules, make the apparent jerking around of participants that much more distasteful.

As much as it irks me to learn of companies exploiting programmers, it bothers me on a more personal level that so many developers are eager to surrender both their time and their integrity to participate in such events. Whether it’s out of hope for a $1M jackpot or, perhaps more troublingly, based in the desperate pursuit of any external validation of their work, these are not ideal outlets for the most talented developers in any field.

Few of us are immune to the lure of prizes and recognition. Every spring, most of my friends and I start gossiping about, maybe dreaming about, the potential winners of the Apple Design Awards. These are conveyed every year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. While Apple seems to stick to the letter of its rules pretty well, the rules themselves sometimes seem capricious, and are not announced until a few months before the “contest.” Nonetheless, myself and others have been caught up some years toiling away on products or features that we wouldn’t otherwise be focused on, all in the vain hope of winning the coveted prize. At least in this scenario with Apple, we may be sacrificing a small amount of integrity, but aren’t outright donating our IP to the company.

I’m reminded by hackathons like Salesforce’s, by Apple’s Design Awards, and even by awards I’ve been humbled to receive such as the Macworld Editor’s Choice Award, that as great as it feels to win a contest, prizes like these shouldn’t be our primary goal. I’ve joked about it some years, when I inevitably don’t win an Apple Design Award, that at least I’m still winning the Customer Design Award. With that quip I mean to remind myself that winning the favor of these small groups of people with power should never be seen as more valuable than winning the favor of the people who really matter.

Who really matters? Yourself, those who are close to you, and the customers you aim to serve. Start each day determined to win the hearts of those people, and strive to remain indifferent about the judgements of Salesforce, Apple, or any other small group of judges that aims to string you along for their gain. You may not win $1M, but you’ll hold on to the most valuable prize of all: your integrity.