Woot!  Our recently release re-vamp of Firefox for Android is climbing the Top Free chart over on the Google Play Store (as it should, it’s frickin’ awesome).  We’ve gone from #96 to #81 in the past 3 days and I have no doubt we will continue to climb as we gain users and get a chance to impress them with the Native UI which is responsive, beautiful, and support Flash.  Our rating in the store is also slowly climbing, but that’s going to be a much harder slog because our current rating still reflects the total collected in the entire life of this product being on the store.  We can’t remove ratings from our previous Firefox for Android and so even though we’ve had 5,000 5-star reviews in the first 10 days of the re-written version being online, our average rating is a 3.7. The only way to get a fresh start would have been to put up a ‘new’ product and call it something else and I’m sure you can understand that Firefox can’t go by any other name.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Google Play store and how it could be better because I interact with its administrative backend regularly, uploading new builds of the mobile products release after release.  I was just sitting through a presentation by Dees at ReMo Camp 2012 in Berlin and he was sharing with us the strategies behind the Mozilla Marketplace. This will be our open-source contribution to mobile/desktop app distribution and seeing the mockups started me thinking about how we could improve the rating system and not just repeat what Google and Apple do with user feedback.

I’d like to see the following:

1. User leaves rating, gives stars + writes text feedback
2. App developer can select reviews to flag as ‘bug report/feedback’ which requires them to write text that will be presented to the user.  The developer can write a message either letting the reporter know that a bug is on file now for the issue or provide help with the issues/questions raised by the user.
3. User gets a notification when the review is flagged and that there is a response ready for them. They can check out the bug report that got filed as a result of their feedback and perhaps they will cc themselves to know when it gets fixed or they might get a chance to try out the suggested solutions from the dev to deal with issues or questions they raised in their original review.
4. User, now that they have gotten feedback, gets prompted to revise their review.
5. Repeat 1-4 as needed

This would be beneficial for many reasons:

• Users get to be a part of helping improve the product
• Users get support from the developer without needing a different forum or login
• Users get visibility into software development process, awareness of upcoming features & improvements, and they become participants in open source community
• App developers have a channel to communicate with users about upcoming dev plans, feature requests, and bug tracking
• App developers get a collected feedback average that is more accurate and representative
• App developers have a channel to communicate with users about upcoming dev plans, feature requests, and bug tracking

I’m used to Mozilla’s collaborative environment, the values of open source, and I’m accustomed to getting feedback in our open bug tracker, Bugzilla.  There are so many companies whose products I use who do not have public bug trackers and this causes me a lot of frustration when I find bugs with their software.  I want to tell their devs about the bugs I find.  Software has bugs!  Have a bug tracker! Let people see and understand that software is a continuous improvement process so we get less reviews like this:

I’d love to let Brian know that we are sooooo close to having our tablet support ready, that we have a few outstanding bugs but it’s on-track to ship with Firefox 15 in a mere 7 weeks. We’re a tiny team compared to the Gopplesoft mobile dev teams, give us a chance to prioritize and push each goal to the finish line. With only 20% of our Firefox mobile users on tablets, we had to focus on the 80% small device folks first and then – remember, only 8 weeks later – we got our tablet ducks in a row and ready for our fabulous tablet users.

Alex should get to see a bug filed on the pinch zoom (if there’s not already one) and as one of the admins of the Firefox product, I should get a chance to interact with the folks who leave 1 or 2 star reviews since they are often based on one or two issues that are real but fixable.  I want our rating to be reflective of the work we do as we do it, incrementally improving over time. Of course, our marketplace code is open source so I suppose I should do what Paul Rouget suggested earlier today and make up some prototypes 🙂