Joe is taking your feedback and bringing to to ZEXY VENTURES who will ignore it and give him 10 lashongs for speaking out. |
Why shouldn’t they, we’re like only a tiny percentage of the tiny percentage of power users. The enormous majority of true power users scrolled past the independent survey, so it just seems like 95% of people who took it were pissed off. ZX knows the hearts and souls of the ever-silent majority, bro, true beer geeks and lovers. Not us who just write things, and bother to be passionate about the site and the feedback we try to give.
But seriously, they need AT LEAST a working barcode scanner and they need it yesterday. And some way to give feedback for beers that miss it. Then it still wouldn’t be enough, but it wouldn’t be laughable anymore. Well, laughable to randoms, saddening for me.
Since my suggestions based on 13 years of using every single aspect of the site, regular and behind the scenes and being in constant interaction with a shitton of beer folk are just not that relevant as they are not in line with their opinion enough, I simply won’t bother with the app for several months at least and check back then. If I can recommend it then to a single beer lover, enthusiast, judge, brewer, random person on the street I know without exposing myself to ridicule (which i cannot now) - and I know nearly everybody on the beer scene of an entire pissant country and a lot of other pissant countries that surround it - I’ll chime in with suggestions.
This was "good enough" for somebody to release. This was in no way "good enough". And because someone/a group of people who get paid for developing it thinks it’s "good enough" and gives it a 1.0.0. version number, I’m worried. Ratebeer needs something brilliant to make up for years of not having anything official, to make up for the hits it took recently. Nothing more, nothing less.
Signing out of this particular discussion. |
Originally posted by puzzl
Well, the score slider is pretty cool. Good work whoever built that.
That’s about all the positive feedback I can give. Beyond that... yikes. People want to complain about the lack of attribute ratings are missing the forest for the trees. Try to use this in a real world setting and realize how quickly you’ll be returning to mobile web. Search is worse than ever; you can’t enter new beers; you can’t navigate to brewery pages; you can’t get cursory information at a glance in search results (or in any view, for that matter). What use case is this app even for? It’s not good for festival rating, because of unreliable search and the inability to enter beers. It’s not good for brewpub rating, because you can’t go to the brewery page. It’s not good for at-home rating, because you can’t put in any details. It’s not good for checking up on what you’ve rated, because the information is so sloppily presented. It’s not good for travel rating, since it requires an internet connection. And it’s certainly not good for new users, since it appears your ratings are entering an abyss when you put them in here, with no real feedback or indication of the greater whole that is Ratebeer. Or badges.
When designing a mobile app to compete with your biggest competitor, you have to use as the core basis for your design: what are we going to do 100% better then them? How are we going to entice users to choose Us over Them? What are their core strengths, and what will we do to also succeed in those? In this new app’s case, the answer appears to be "absolutely nothing" for all of the above. The only real advantage RB has these days over Untappd is the accuracy and cleanliness of the database, but that strength is never leveraged here, especially with a search engine straight out of 1995 (no non-consecutive strings? really?). Fast is only good if it works.
So, you aren’t getting any new users with this. You offer nothing to "mid" users to entice them away from Untappd. And you are actively pushing away the resolute few hardcore raters who remain. Bad juju.
I do hope this app can gain closer parity to the website at some point—and, of course, leverage the strengths of native apps that websites can’t do—but, considering how long it took just to get this demo, I don’t remain hopeful.
This is just completely honest, pinpoint accuracy, truth.
I agree the slider is very well done.
An additional issue, on my 4 inch screen I can’t even see the rating window. Check my last rate to see the typos if rating when you can’t see what you are writing. I know 4 inch screens are a minority of devices but still, super spotty work. |
|
|
Originally posted by egajdzis
The way I see it, I’ve used untappd as a placeholder when I am out to assign a score, then when I have time I type the rating over here. Now I can assign it an accurate RB score, and it keeps a placeholder. Then when I have time I can give it a rating. Obviously there are still a lot of limitations, as others have pointed out. But at least I have been able to stop using untappd (for beers which are already on RB).
I agree if the search feature worked well and if I could enter beers At the moment, I would still have to rely on untappd to rate almost any new beer. |
One of the biggest problems (other than missing features) I see with the app is that it opens when I click on a beer using the browser on my phone. Sent in feedback in June and again after this release.
Uninstalled the app. I’ll try the next release, hopefully it’s fixed. |
I agree with all the complaints. This is not 1.0 release, too many bugs and features missing. I hate that I can’t add complete scores, a single number is useless for me. Average score is also a must. I will keep using the old app for now. |
Originally posted by adamnowek
Watch this turn into another 40-page thread where the complaints of dedicated users that have bought Premium membership for years get completely ignored.
Joe’s arrogance alone whilst dismissing my points about the importance of keeping your core users happy is reason enough to not renew my donation, let alone continue contributing to a database like this for free. People like me (and that includes people that are admins, have been admins, have rated five times more than I have, or dedicate swathes of their own free time without compensation to improve this website’s darabase) should not be dismissed just because Joe thinks he knows how to do user research.
Beyond that, any ratings that come from this bizarre choice to allow arbitrary 0-5 ratings means that this website will become clogged with data points that are not in any way comparable; simplified in-app ratings are more likely to tend towards the extremes, rather than established mean scores.
I encourage anyone that agrees with this approach to give the lowest possible rating to the app in the applicable place. The kinds of people that are drawn to RateBeer as opposed to the competition are coming here precisely because they want a more detailed experience, not because they want to use an inferior version of Untappd.
A RateBeer app should allow RateBeer users to rate beers on RateBeer. This app does not allow that.
+1 |
|
|
Originally posted by Sledutah
One of the biggest problems (other than missing features) I see with the app is that it opens when I click on a beer using the browser on my phone. Sent in feedback in June and again after this release.
Uninstalled the app. I’ll try the next release, hopefully it’s fixed.
I just uninstalled it from the tablet too, so annoying every beer link I click to open in the app and then in portrait too.
I’ll wait till this is fixed before I give it another try. |
I’m a bit confused. Seems like the App only allows .5,1,2,3,4,5 as ’ratings’. These are then ticks. Are they recorded as ticks? As far as I can tell you cannot actually rate on the mobile app. Getting rid of individual attributes (taste, aroma etc.) and going just out of 50 (5.0) is a lot of different than going out of 1-5. |
Originally posted by Christos
Originally posted by Sledutah
One of the biggest problems (other than missing features) I see with the app is that it opens when I click on a beer using the browser on my phone. Sent in feedback in June and again after this release.
Uninstalled the app. I’ll try the next release, hopefully it’s fixed.
I just uninstalled it from the tablet too, so annoying every beer link I click to open in the app and then in portrait too.
I’ll wait till this is fixed before I give it another try.
You can disable this from the app’s settings. It’s an Android thing.
 |
