Leveling Up: Major App Upgrade Earns 95% Positive Feedback

By DeHub Team — 2024-07-01

A major app upgrade shipped in Q3 2024 and drew 95% positive feedback.

What a 95% figure is worth

Less than it appears, and we would rather say so.

Feedback on a release is self-selecting. The people who respond are disproportionately the engaged ones, and satisfaction scores on a redesign tend to be high in the first weeks regardless of the redesign, because novelty reads as improvement.

We report it because it is what the number was. We did not treat it as validation, and the more useful signals were behavioural — whether sessions got longer, whether people found features they had previously missed, whether support volume on specific screens dropped.

What the upgrade contained

It shipped alongside the interface overhaul and a 200% backend speed improvement in the same quarter. In practice they were one release described two ways: the parts users could see, and the parts that made those parts usable.

The reason they arrived together is that a redesign on a slow backend is a slower application that looks nicer, which users correctly experience as worse.

The 5%

The critical feedback is why this milestone matters at all, because it was specific and it was consistent.

Almost all of it clustered on two things:

Onboarding, still. The single most persistent complaint in DeHub's history, unchanged in substance since the 50 user interviews we ran in Q1 2021, where wallet setup was identified as the wall people hit. Three years and a full rebuild later, it was still the wall.

Discovery. People could not reliably find things they knew existed. That is a much harder problem than it sounds, and it does not show up in satisfaction scores because users do not report missing what they never found.

What it produced

Both complaints shaped the following year directly. The revamped app feed with audio replies and live talk spaces in Q2 2025 was largely a discovery response, and the messaging work in Q1 2025 addressed the related problem of things reaching people at all.

The general lesson

A 95% positive result is a reason to look harder at the 5%, not a reason to stop. The satisfied majority tells you the release did not break anything they relied on. The dissatisfied minority tells you where the product still is not good, and on both counts here they had been telling us for three years.

Why we publish the figure anyway

Because omitting it would be its own kind of dishonesty, and because the caveats are more useful attached to a real number than delivered in the abstract.

The industry norm is to publish satisfaction figures without any explanation of how they were gathered, which makes them impossible to weigh. Ours came from users who chose to respond, in the weeks after a release, when novelty is doing part of the work. That is not a criticism of the result — it is the context required to read it.

If a project reports a satisfaction number and does not tell you who was asked, when, and what proportion answered, the number is decoration. Including ours.