Why star ratings don't make sense for all product & services
Star rating system is being used in most of the products & services we use today. Users who have extreme experiences (either very bad or very good) are more likely to leave rating & review than users who have average experiences, thus creating selection biases. The difference between 4.5 stars and 4.8 stars could be massive, making it hard for users to differentiate between decent products/services from very good ones.
How Important Are Reviews/Ratings ⭐
Reviews are an integral part of the business in our digital age of consumerism. Nearly 9 in 10 consumers, an online review is as important as a personal recommendation. Nowadays users are spending a lot of time researching and reading reviews.
1 Star or 5 Stars? 🤔
Positive reviews can increase sales; negative ones can do just the opposite. A one-star increase in user ratings on Yelp, for example, can boost revenue by 5 to 9 percent for a restaurant according to a 2011 Harvard Business Review study. Research suggests that products/services which have exceeded people’s expectations, or if they bad experience only they will give a review/rating. If instead, they had a moderate view, they’re likely to have left no review at all, finding it not worth the time and effort.
This creates a “bi-modal” or “J-shaped” distribution of online product reviews that have been well-documented in the academic literature. This makes it hard to learn about true quality from online reviews. The following are some companies who have replaced their star rating system.
Netflix
Netflix has replaced the old five-star rating system to a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” system. “When people see thumbs, they know that they are used to teach the system about their tastes with the goal of finding more great content,” the company blog reveals. “That’s why when we tested replacing stars with thumbs we saw an astounding 200% increase in rating activity.”
A simple and straightforward approach to getting user inputs enables the company to suggest better content.
Youtube
Youtube made an official blog explaining why they switched from 5-star ratings to “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”. They mentioned when it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.
Margaret Gould Stewart, UX Lead at YouTube said “Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. It’s going to be much easier for people to engage with”
Users don't have an option to rate businesses on a star rating scale of 1 to 5 anymore. Instead, they are presented with a simple, Do you recommend “business name”? Yes or No? In addition, you can explain why you recommend the business by using tags, text, and photos. With this approach, users can give honest feedback to the business.
Standards for 5 Stars Rating 🤩
User’s personality, mood, environment, the urgency of the requirement, eventual gratification are some of the factors weigh in during their rating/review. Each person has a different standard and gives a rating accordingly. For example, let’s take any e-hailing app (Uber, Grab etc) customers might give a 5-star rating because being delivered to their destination safely is the only expectation they have. For other customers, 5-star experience means pleasant conversation, clean car, efficient ride, etc. Without clear guidelines from a company about what star rating means, there is bound to be a huge variation.
Rating Average
A good article on The Psychology of Rating System by Himanshu Khanna says “Some of the rating systems suffer from a tad overlooked fallacy — the Concept of Averaging. For instance, beyond a critical number of ratings, a 5-star rating for a service (or a product) would average out to a certain number, let’s say 4.3. In most scenarios from hereon, given the ratings continue to pour in good numbers, it will require a considerable amount of extreme ratings (1 or 5) to move 4.3 to 4.4 or 4.2. The 5-star rating of 4.3, after N number of ratings, becomes the average rating! Anything amazing or pathetic from this point on, might not affect this rating considerably, preventing the real feedback from being visible”
How to make it better
The following are some of the companies that have segregated ratings based on each feature. This gives a very good and detailed insight to users who are researching a product/service.
We are in a world of criticism and judgment. The rating system has to depend on the product and services provided. We need to ensure that customers are told what the ratings represent. Each person may think 5 stars mean something different until you eliminate that ambiguity. As digital products are increasing day by day getting the user data as accurate as possible is the only way to increase the quality of a product/service which in turn increases their sales and profit.
Please be free to give your feedback and suggestions to my article and it will be awesome if you would share some UI designs which would be a better version or an upgrade to our current star rating system you might find in e-commerce, e-hailing, and other services.
