Hot answers tagged ratings
27
There was a fantastic case put forward a while ago (if I find it I'll edit this answer) that the ideal number is actually 4 stars.
The idea is that people naturally gravitate towards the 3 in a 5-star system (or the 2 in a 3-star system) because it's easy. Go ahead and look at your iTunes library; if you're anything like me you have squillions of 3s.
By ...
26
Difficulty can be expressed in several ways:
Gears or brains - More means increasing mental difficulty.
Shovels - More means increasing physical difficulty.
Clock - More means increasing length in time, and as such, motivational difficulty.
18
Down votes are useful when looking at a narrow interest community (like this forum). It is likely that one person down voting an item gives useful information for most of the other users. But if you're talking about a narrow topic in a broad audience, that down vote tells me very little.
Take music as an example. If you love classical music, does the ...
18
Google started enabling a vote system based on 1-5 rates for Videos on Youtube. They noticed people were using it as a mere Boolean switch: 1 or 5.
You may use a Star system, but expect rather unbalanced results where most of the feedback will come in the shape of 1(no) - 5(like). You may want to skip the experiment and rather design a simple 'yay/nay' ...
13
There are two problems here; you lose a lot of granularity for detailed ratings (with reviews/ect), and users of undetailed ratings (just a rating, no review) don't really use neutral votes.
Detailed ratings like Amazon's reviews really need extra granularity. By detailed I mean users are doing more than rating; they're explaining the why, they're giving a ...
12
I believe having a negative voting is useful!
Normally most of the content is rated positively, but there are situations where the content is most definitely bad and by voting negative you give that input to other viewers (take Stack Exchange's sites for example, the up/down system is effective IMO). People like to voice their opinions.
It does affect me ...
10
I prefer like/dislike as a user. This gives me three choices (not boolean, as Tieson T. suggests): Like - Dislike - Don't vote (neutral).
The third one could be made explicit. Perhaps through the use of smileys. I don̈́'t want to spend a long time pondering "Well, it could be a 3, but maybe it
s close enough to 4.. hm...".
Users are lazy. The general trend ...
9
While I agree with @Dmitry about using color, I think the two can work together also.
Take the trail ratings used on mountains, for instance:
9
I'm spinning on with JOG's points on inviting a user to rate and also enforcing user interaction once rated.
Default:
When slidinig down:
When sliding up:
This approach incorporates the controls of the Youtube like/dislike control which enforces user interaction with feedback.
This could be a way to invite users to use the rating control and it will ...
9
A few reasons:
One, it's negative. It sounds silly, but it's often better to expose users to as few elements of negativity as possible. Keep things light and friendly.
Two, you can still identify bad content with the right algorithms. Certain content terms, poor reader conversion rates, and a lack of upvotes relative to similar content all suggest bad ...
9
The control looks great and is intuitive, I would only change 2 things:
Make the default a positive ~75% rating [or whichever produces the :) before the awesome :D rating], because:
It's the most recognizable emoticon which would best convey what the slider does
A satisfied customer will just want to finish the process as quickly as possible and quite ...
9
Try creating a set of icons - where the symmetrical icon would be a circle with a line halfway through (acting as a mirror).
Then gradually making the two sides less symmetrical, so offsetting the semi circles, and so on until you have a semi circle one side and a triangle on the other (or something that is equally not as symmetrical)
Equally if you can, I ...
8
Lack of reviews certainly looks like lack of activity, I would personally recommend taking advantage of the "0 reviews" situation. Instead of just displaying that you could have a little label that says something like "No reviews yet; be the first to Review!" Or maybe just "Own this product? Write a review!" if you want to not draw attention to the fact that ...
7
I think in order to get a fair response from the users, it's important not to sway the question or voting system in any way, in particular any that may evoke an emotional response from the way the question is presented.
Not only does this potentially sway results in a way that cannot be measured, but it also affects responses in an unequal way depending on ...
7
Like/dislike systems are unambiguous. Either you generally like something, or you don't; you can't have both. With enough votes one way or the other, you can get a sense for just how much people generally like or dislike something.
Rating systems in general are ambiguous; my standards are likely different to yours, and to Bob's and his will likely be ...
6
To only be able to give positive feedback takes away a lot of the meaning behind asking for user feedback in the first place.
For example; imagine that TripAdvisor only gave people the choice to say they liked the holiday or not say anything at all. I for one would then have less faith in the site as a whole. Negative feedback isn't itself bad; it is ...
5
Reviews add a lot of credibility to your product. Especially if they look genuine. The more detail you add to them the better. Also the more interactivity you add to the the better. Take a site like Amazon for example. Anyone that purchases a product can write a review, at any given time.
Seesmic also does a great job a putting a face on their ...
5
Having only a like button can definitely work for certain sites where 'liking' something can be subjective. Such as art or design.
If you visit behance.net and look at an item, once you look at it you can 'click to appreciate', but you can't say 'this sucks'. The items that get a lot of appreciation will bubble up above those that didn't get any votes.
5
Consider a 'star rating' system, with each 'star' icon representing the skill or profession in question.
Think about some recipe books: many rate difficulty by a number of chef's hats. Likewise, I've seen some software manuals use computer icons, and I've seen instructions for knitting show pairs of needles.
Similarly, you could swap in an image that ...
5
I don't think I would get it because the moment I touch the slider, I can no longer see the face:
I really like @AndroidHustle 's solution, but it would still be covered by the finger. So I am going to recommend the following:
5
Yes, a simple mechanism for feedback can be much more effective than a longer usability survey.
The key for understanding this is to consider the time investment that you're asking your users to make when they give you feedback.
Almost everyone will be willing to give you a single click of feedback.
Almost noone will be willing to spend an hour writing an ...
5
Any star rating on a public facing website that doesn't limit it to one vote per person, is essentially meaningless. If you want it to mean anything, you need to restrict it to signed in users.
Anything else that you do may look like a rating, but will really offer none of the benefits of a rating. If there isn't some business reason that you want people ...
4
The nicest one I can think of is the Wireless type of icon that has the scale of 1-5 and at the same time can be color coded for priority/emergency (red for show stopper, orange for medium, etc...)
The Images below will show you the idea, but they are only on a scale from 1 to 4 you can easily create your own set to go from 1 to 5.
4
There are often many different ways that votes can be registered.
In YouTubes case if they got rid of the down vote they can still measure the number of times someone starts watching a video, but doesn't finish. This is the ultimate down vote.
In between that there are the number of people that watch the whole video, but don't Upvote.
Then there are the ...
3
I strongly believe the question you're asking is purely context specific.
For starters, I believe the "clear" button in your implementation is wrong because in a star-based rating system, a series of empty stars means the worst possible rating the control can accept. It's like grading something 0 in a 0-5 scale.
In the 2nd screenshot you provide it is ...
3
So when there are no reviews for a particular product, is something like '0 reviews for this product' displayed?
As a user you could probably interpret that as, 'No reviews, so no one has probably bought this product, I won't risk it either!'
I think that could be the problem. If there are no reviews then just don't display any 'zero reviews' text. I can't ...
3
Starring usually is very unclear. Not only as @waldito said because mainly 1 and 5 will be used.
Also because, theoretical, there is no 'dislike' in this system. 1 star could be interpreted as recommended-a-little-bit or as a dislike.
Further, like/dislike is at the same time a "pass this on to my friends". Probably because Facebook started using it like ...
3
It may depend on what kind of data you want access to at a later date. Like/dislike is a pure boolean value; they either like or dislike, and those are the only two values you can store.
Now if you allow a star rating system, you can store the number of "votes" of each value for that item, so that, say a year or so down the line, you can do a bit more ...
3
What about using some kind of progression of repeated shapes - perhaps not stars, but arrows ...
The idea being that "more shapes" = "more effort".
You could combine this with colours if you like, but having distinct shapes has benefits for
(a) anyone with colour vision deficit; or
(b) anyone who prints the page in black and white.
While I like the ...
3
You basically need to present a bunch of items and you have more than one metric to sort them by. Most websites who offer lists of items have this figured out well. You either present a sortable table where the rows are your items and the columns are the metrics, or do this via filters or tabs or any other navigation solution. Just make sure you provide an ...
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