How do you rate?

[Briggs]

Hello Local Guides,

I've been wondering. We tend to have discussions about whether we should be including full well-thoughtout written reviews on top of our star ratings or otherwise. Of course, the review itself should allow the reader to gather some few first impressions about why you gave the rating, and so it's interesting to see how people rates all across the board.

So I decided to put the distribution of my ratings into a pie chart from quite a painstakingly manual process as follows, and the results are:

This is my pie chart of ratings distributions. Lookie here, no one stars!

From my observations, I seem to be a pretty happy go lucky reviewer. For the most part, I'm someone who is relatively and easily pleased, giving four and five star reviews all around. Fortunately for myself, I haven't had an experience so terrible to the point that I had to leave a one star review, so I guess that's fortunate in a way. No food-poisoning, no angry waiters or staff members in totality, no incorrect order with bad uncooked food... so far as a local guide.

I want to bring the discussion to you. Consider the following questions as a guide, and I'll add in my answers as well promptly:

• What is your baseline criteria for giving a specific rating? You may like to split your criteria into each of the ratings (e.g. 1/2/3/4/5 stars)
• Do you think the five star rating is good for Google Maps in terms of its usage, intervals (e.g. no half-stars) and/or weighting?
• Have you ever felt like you should be giving more than 5 stars, or ever put a rating that doesn't even deserve 1? Discuss.
• As far as I know, you cannot write a written review without putting in a rating, yet you can star a listing without writing anything down. Should this be looked at or considered?

I look forward to reading your ideas!

Cheers,

zB

[Briggs]

Here are my answers to each of the questions as intended:

• What is your baseline criteria for giving a specific rating? You may like to split your criteria into each of the ratings (e.g. 1/2/3/4/5 stars)
  As I prefer, I will split each of the ratings into each, starting from the best of course since I'm an optimist, hehe!
  5 Stars: My experience in general has been positively memorable, from having excellent tasting dishes in a great span of time, to aesthetic architecture indoors and outdoors, to having great client, staff and server interactions all around, excellent standard and longevity in fabric material/resistance (leading to staggered, later reviews), surpassed my expectations and was professional in its/their conduct as a whole.
  4 Stars: Today's visit all in all has met and went close to as I expected based on first impressions. General, straightforward, seamless and easy in its normal everyday operations as far as I know. Great quality in general and is quite well in my books.
  3 Stars: As the ratings pretty much tier, the experience was quite ordinary, a little bit too ordinary if you catch my drift. Ranging from customer service, general food, cleanliness, conduct, presentation, attitude and a whole range of things, the time spent proved to be nothing special, or is in need of improvement.
  2 Stars: When businesses/listings get two stars under my wing, there is some concern or real need of improvement, refurbishment or reconsideration. For some, the food might be subpar, temperature it might be off. Either the complex could feel quite dated or dirty or there is no real style to it. It may have taken way too long to be served, or even the service as a whole was pretty bland, and made me feel disappointed enough to move on right to another place worthy of at least four stars.
  1 Star: I have never given one star to a place as of yet. The instances that I could give one star to include but are not limited to, derelict shopping centres, extremely rude or non-existent customer service, incessant noise contrary to the function of the business, food-poisoning or lack of allergenic disclosure, very poorly cooked and incorrect food served, and the list goes on. Thankfully, this may not include phone calls to a restaurant that started shouting at me because of my indecisiveness to order simply because they didn't want to deliver to a far away suburb (after super-poor negotiations).

• Do you think the five star rating is good for Google Maps in terms of its usage, intervals (e.g. no half-stars) and/or weighting?
  As I prefer, Google Maps has a pretty simplistic rating system. You could be torn by giving four and a half stars to a place, whereas the burger joint you thought was supreme should've been four instead, and not five. Weighting wise, of course you'll have those people that just ingenerously give one star ratings for no reason, or their experience as a whole was super simple-minded, and so they gave five stars to even the nearest grocery store they visited that you might think should've gotten two. Everyone's different, but that's what makes the community so rich. I say, leave as is for the meantime, but watch the spammers and report those people who don't rate or review properly!

• Have you ever felt like you should be giving more than 5 stars, or ever put a rating that doesn't even deserve 1? Discuss.
  Have you heard of anyone giving out five gold stars or getting absolutely no stars whatsoever? Perhaps in a video game if you don't reach the threshold, I suppose that makes sense. But then having to list the amount of reviews that gave nil or "more than 5" stars would prove to be much more tedious, and how would that help the business or the reviewer in any way for future reference?

• As far as I know, you cannot write a written review without putting in a rating, yet you can star a listing without writing anything down. Should this be looked at or considered?
  There isn't any solid reason why someone should be writing a review without putting a rating whatsoever. You could write the most spectacular, detailed and most pinpointed review, but the stars that you rate are a quick and easy point of reference other Google Maps users can quickly glance over and also index into its distribution of reviews. But I don't see why this option shouldn't be looked or considered.
  

Those are my answers, hope you can participate in these! Let me know how you review, and how many reviews you have in total! I have just over 400 full reviews.

[ErmesT]

Thanks @Briggs

To share with us this interesting analysis. Talking about me, I'm usually going to places that I know, where I feel comfortable, so my ratings are usually high.

If I have to go in a restaurant or in a shop for the first time, I usually check the rating, and I try to avoid places with a very low rate. But I had to give 1 star, in some very horrible place. Usually I explain in the reviews the reason of the rating, to give to the business the opportunity to improve it, and only once a business had complained to me. After my explanation, they changed the way to approach the customer, and I changed my rating 🙂

Ermes 

[Briggs]

Thank you Ermes for your response!
It's good to know when businesses listen to their customers and really take in their reviews. Somehow, I myself actually like to go to some of these low-star restaurants, to give them the benefit of the doubt. Only sometimes do I find myself surprised amidst a sea of no stars do I find myself in a galaxy of taste and exquisitivity. That or I really have no style in taste whatsoever ahah!

Cheers.

[JeroenM]

Hi @Briggs,

Thank you for starting this interesting discussion on rating behaviors. I assume you are familiar with this great forum post already?

When rating myself, I follow the thumb rule of 1 star = I hate it, 3 stars = okay and 5 = stars I loved it. Of course, I give importance to different things, pending the type of place I visited.

Staying on campsites a lot, a good, warm shower makes a big difference. When visiting a museum, the presentation and lighting of the artifacts are rather important, for example. I would not say that I am easy to please and certain things in the service industry can quickly make me unhappy.

Fortunately, I had fewer reviews to count than you, but here is my pie-chart based on 251  reviews:

How I rated - more five stars than I expected 🙂

Whilst I was counting, I noted that most 5 star reviews were related to museums. Campsites more often in the 2-3 star range and restaurants mostly four stars. I have not actually counted by category, but that is the impression I got whilst going through the list 5 times (counting a rating level at a time).

When preparing some lessons for the Review & Rating course, I did some desk-research on articles related to people's rating behavior. One thing I remember was that ratings without actual reviews seem to be far less effective. In other words, the range of stars tends to be either very high or low and not much in between. This is why certain social driven websites and companies like Netflix apparently changed their rating system. YouTube only has the thumbs up and thumbs down, which makes perfect sense since it is unlikely that any viewer would actually write a review after seeing a YouTube video.

Personally, I always read the reviews when deciding if I wish to go somewhere and not simply go by the rating. Often, the context of a review gives a far better indication what was actually influencing the rating and thus give me a chance to judge how this weighs in my selection process. From the business perspective, I find it rather unfair to see some get low ratings without a review to back it up and thus leaving the owner clueless what was wrong.

[AndréCGurgel]

My criteria reserves the 1 and 5 star ratings to the rare situations where I must explicitly indicate an out of the chart place.

1* = Exceptionally horrible. Indescribably dirty. Poisonous food. Worst-than-lousy service.

2**, 3***, 4*** = As usual; equivalent to the very common 1-3-5 rating.

5***** = One (maybe two) in a lifetime experience.

[Mountains]

As a small business perspective, Rating a business should be rated with mostly 2 to 4 star experiences but this is not the trends. As @AndréCGurgel and @JeroenM mentioned rating a 1 star if you get food poisoning. I have have food poisoning 3 times and have still went back to those places and could not rate them 1 star. The other factors that I would like to know that the feel of most of these reviews are for restaurants. Where is data on different segments of businesses reviews. My small business is a specially automotive repair shop with detailed repairs sometimes taking months to have parts repaired. a review for a specialty business like this is not the same as getting a cup of coffee from starbucks.

[JeroenM]

@Mountains

It wasn't me who mentioned food poisoning 😉

Statistics is a science and from dipping my toes in some interesting articles on the subject of rating products and services, I am sure that there is existing research available that answers your question in relation to rating/ reviewing different industries and type of businesses/ services.

I understand that when one has very few customers in a year, that the Google type reviews might not work out so well. After all, statistics work out better with higher sample numbers. My guess is though, that a specialized business like your specialty car workshop would have a niche target group that is small enough for you to either have or not have a certain reputation. I would expect carophiles to hang out on other online platforms (forums) and meet at shows and read specialized magazines/ blogs about cars. I question how important Google Maps would be for that kind of niche business?

So, my question to you would be, have you ever done any market research to find out how many of your customers did come from Google Maps? 

Does education affect how people review?  Probably yes. So assuming this is so, one could then say if you work in a business with a target group of highly educated people, then that should affect how your business is rated/ reviewed.

When I order croquettes in a restaurant and they are still frozen on the inside when served, but when I tell the waiter so and he/she apologetically deals with it and they tasted delicious, I might still give them a 4-star rating. Now if this was a specialized restaurant that only serves croquettes (yes they do exist), I would probably have a different view (higher expectations)

Sometimes friends remind me that I am rather spoiled with experiences. So what I might think as mediocre, might be the best ever for somebody else.

Then if I go to a specialized museum and "ignorant" visitors give it a bad review and yet, one person gives it a five-star and by reading that review I know this person knows what he is talking about, do I care about the popular vote for that museum...? 

To get back to the topic started by Briggs, when I do come across a place that has less than 5 reviews and I am kind of interested in the place, I do actually click on the reviewers to check their other contributions and get a feel for their review style/ behavior to decide how much weight I give their opinion.

[NickMorris]

Great question!

What is your baseline criteria for giving a specific rating? You may like to split your criteria into each of the ratings (e.g. 1/2/3/4/5 stars)

I actually go about things a little differently. If a place meets my expectations I generally give it a 4, if it exceeds them it gets a 5 and if it doesn't meet them it gets a 3. If the experience it really bad then I'd consider a 1 or 2 but haven't had that yet. If the expectations are really high and experience meets those high expectations then I'll also give it a 5 (rather than 4). My expectations are based on the look, branding, marketing, pricing etc. of the place that I can gather before I make the commitment to go there. If I haven't had a chance to gather any info beforehand then it would be just based on my general expectations for this type of business.

I find this works well for several reasons;

• It scales well between different types of places in the same category e.g. you can't compare a cheap hostel and an expensive resort on the same quality rating scale or else the hostel would always get 1 star, even if the value its providing for the price is quite high.
• It's generous to the business (and balances out ratings of others that are completely un-generous if not downright malicious). Having run small businesses myself and worked with many, I know how difficult it is so I always like to give the benefit of the doubt to the business (Side note about giving the business the benefit of the doubt: there's a restaurant I visited recently where the experience was less than ideal but it was their opening week with new staff and they were very busy so I'm waiting to revisit before I submit my review). If its a (non-business) landmark such as a statue or a huge chain (not a small business) then I'm more likely to give lower ratings. 

Do you think the five star rating is good for Google Maps in terms of its usage, intervals (e.g. no half-stars) and/or weighting?

It's easy but often I feel like I'd like to 10 stars (or half stars) to make it more granular. It would also be cool if you could rate different aspects of a business rather than one number to represent everything.

Have you ever felt like you should be giving more than 5 stars, or ever put a rating that doesn't even deserve 1? Discuss.

I think that however good or bad an experience is it can always get better or worse so you're always going to have the problem of wanting to give more than 5 stars (as its better than some other experience that you already gave a 5) or less than 1 (because its worse than some other experience you already gave a 1). The other option would be to have a infinite scale that you constantly re-adjust... or perhaps a ranking...

As far as I know, you cannot write a written review without putting in a rating, yet you can star a listing without writing anything down. Should this be looked at or considered?

It really irks me when I see reviews without ratings, particuarly 1, 2 and 3 star ratings. To me, the lack of review on these ratings makes me doubt whether they're legit (because they're either fake/malicious or the person hasn't given them much/any thought). I guess you could say the same for 5 star ratings. Maybe 1, 2 and 5 star ratings should be required to be accompanied by a review?

[JeroenM]

I came across this interesting article about peoples perception and experience of online reviews.

Best wishes to you all, Jeroen