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Rating system for online marketplace
Marketplaces require rating system to evaluate the quality of the products/services listed as well as their providers. Most of the popular marketplaces around are using a variation or combination of scale (star, slider), binary (like/dislike) and written reviews. This post is my thoughts on each of the rating system and how they should be used.
Scale rating (5 star rating)
5 star rating can be found everywhere. It is a standard rating scale that’s being used by popular marketplace sites like Amazon and most app stores. Because this system is so common,it is intuitive to average users in terms of how they interpret and cast the ratings (clicking on desire number of stars). Visually, star ratings are very appealing and noticeable compare to number or text (number of reviews), therefore it is easy for users to scan and compare a list of ratings at once. Lastly, scale rating is extremely powerful and flexible because you can obtain feedback with great detail by increasing the number of scale level.
While it became almost a design pattern on marketplace sites, some designers argue that star rating is bad and ambiguous because users have different interpretation of each scale level and most of the time users either like something or they hate it. People also like to mentioned that YouTube switched from 5 star rating to a binary system, however it only demonstrated that their users were rating their videos in a binary way therefore it’s logical for them to convert to a binary system and not necessary saying that binary rating is better than scale rating. Despite the flaws mentioned, star scale rating is extremely effective and should be used unless your user can benefit from a binary setup.
Binary rating (Thumbs up/Thumbs down)
A binary rating system is simple and effective.Many designers (here is one example) advocate binary rating over a scale rating because it is less ambiguous. Common social scores such as “like” and “follow” should be considered a form of binary rating (with like vs no like). However, using “like” and “follow” can only be used to rank items but not enough for users to compare items with. In general, a…
