Rating Ratings
Why Stars?
Since the dawn of of our species man has looked to the heavens and pondered at the meaning of the stars. Well maybe they did, I wasn't there. Why are stars used for reviews? Kids get gold star stickers for doing something good, maybe this is the origin.
Why is 5 the normal star scale? Perhaps Amazon chose this and now it is ubiquitous.
How was What?
"Horrible- such a perfect product but the delivery guy left my package at the bottom of my steps. 1 star!"
-Karen
Are the stars rating the product, the seller, the order, the delivery or some combo?
Other Oddities
Verified Purchase: Why is this a thing? I mean, why is a review from somebody that didn't purchase the item a thing. You shouldn't have to say verified purchase, that should be the only way to make a review.
Incentivized Reviews: "I received this product free in exchange for an honest review. 5 stars!" Companies like Amazon could easily have prevented this, or stopped it.
I give the current system of ratings a
Alternative Rating Systems
Normalize Reviewer History
Reviewers should be encouraged to use all the stars, not just 1 and 5. If a reviewer only has 1 and 5 star reviews they aren't using this system correctly, or the system isn't designed properly.
The reviews could be ingored, telling the reviewers why.
Using standard normal distribution, 3 star reviews should represent about 68% of all reviews. 2 and 4 star reviews would represent 13.6% each and 1 and 5 stars would represent 2.2% each. These could be normalized towards the mean.
Binary
Regarding this product...
- thumbs up/thumbs down
- Regret purchase/Would buy again
Three
I like the number three, it is everywhere. Small, medium and large. Left, center, right. White, grey, black. Negative, neutral, positive.
Three Squared
Negative, neutral and positive can be further broken down into 3 each.
| 7 Pretty good | 8 Great | 9 Blown away |
| 4 useable | 5 it gets the job done | 6. Fine |
| 1 Worthless Garbage | 2 Horrible | 3 Almost useless |
SKWID
- Super Awesome
- Kinda Cool
- Whatever
- I've Seen Better
- Don't Get Me Start
Chart It
Is making a reviewer think a bad thing? Maybe you don't want them to think about a purchase, just give you the money with little friction. Reviews should have a little friction if you want quality reviews.
A $5 pair of socks and a $5000 piece of electronics probably shouldn't share the same rating system.
Ratings and Reviews are a commodity. Buy something off the shelf from a third-party, installa script on your site and forget about it. It shouldn't be this way. If you sell products, these "stars" represent the quality of your product. A generic and meaningless UI is telling what a company thinks about its products and how much they care about ratings.
Most companies get an E for effort. An E is barely above and F grade, I think, maybe it is the same as an F+ or a D-. I suppose with kids going to school and getting graded on this asinine scale we should be please with the improved 5 star scale.