Following my suggestion to improve the German translation ( German Criteria translation needs improvement ), I would now like to suggest a highly necessary update to the Review rejection workflow aswell.
As it stands right now, if a user wants to reject a submission during review, and they thumbs down on “Appropriate”, they are met with this:
This does not explain to the user properly, what the denial criteria actually means. For that, they would need to press on the (i) icon instead. The main issue is, that the options on the rejection menu are misleading.
- Private property is misleading as it’s meant to be private residential property
- Adult location is misleading as it’s meant to be adult-oriented location
- Schools is misleading as K-12 locations don’t necessarily have to be schools and other examples are mentioned in the criteria explanation
- Sensitive location isn’t explained here at all
- Obstructs emergency operations is fine
- Generic business also isn’t explained at all
Judging from the high amount of false rejections I and other members of the community get, especially when submitting in a town/city, I would like to suggest for the rejection pop-up for Appropriate to be changed to something similar to what comes up with the “Report” button.
I assume the Report button has more extensive explanations in place to prevent false reports, which waste the time of Niantic employees - hence I would appreciate more extensive explanations in place to prevent false rejections, which waste the time of both reviewers and submitters.
The following mock-up tries to explain the criteria more closely to reviewers and provides valuable examples. The text might be a bit bulky and can be improved writing-wise, keep in mind that English is not my first language. I put a watermark on the image to show more clearly, that this is not an official screenshot, as
- this probably is too night and day
- this has my interpretations of criteria in them
- and said interpretation might not be accurate, as I might be misunderstanding things, overlooking details or because I tried to crunch the text to not make it too long
The idea behind my suggestion is what I’m trying to bring across, not necessarily the full correctness of the content, so please don’t take this as criteria advice, as this is very cut & dry.
I also think, that on the “Permanent and Distinct” rejection pop-up, it should warn users from the most common false rejections that happen with this rejection reason. I don’t know which one that could be, but I’m sure sports clubs, community buildings etc. probably commonly get falsely denied.
Furthermore, I personally think that if Niantic accepts an appeal for a stop that was denied by reviewers, that reviewers should be notified that their decision has been overturned and why. This helps users to learn from their mistakes and improves criteria. I’ve written an example mail for how users could be notified of their mistake:
