Your description “How much do you like this album?” is very good and helped me understand the difference — I agree with you!

What I am thinking now: You sould put this description in your pattern-page to clarify the usecase of this pattern.

IMO there are different UseCases:
UseCase restaurant-rating: 1-5 stars, all good. Like you sad “How much do you like this X?”

UseCase musik-rating: x + 4 stars, bad meaning “dont show again”, star meaning “so or so good”. Like you sad: “Do you like this album?”

UseCase ?: Thumps — but I am not shure about this one…

Even if you just describe one pattern at your library it would helb to clarify the usecase your description is based on (I just remenber that you already do this with paging/pagination-pattern for search vs. prev/next vs. …).

regards, Tobias

First, we too have some locations on Yahoo that employ a pattern like the one you discuss (where an ‘x’ is presented alongside stars and semantically means ‘I don’t like this’ — for example, Yahoo Music’s recommender engine lets you state your dislike for a song, and only give you 4 stars to choose from: http://urltea.com/20tu

Regrettably, we also have -other- places on Yahoo! that use an ‘x’ somewhat differently. There, the ‘x’ undoes the star-rating that I’ve already selected for something. It’s more like a ‘clear’ action. (Why the different behavior? Cause Yahoo is a pretty big boat to steer around, with many captains. ;-) This is why we need the pattern library!)

But-to your point- I agree. There is a bit of a mismatch between the notion of ‘awarding a star’ (which, even if it’s just 1 star, does seem like a positive, affirmative action) and giving something a negative rating. I guess it all depends on your interpretation of the ‘question’ that a star-rating widget is posing to you.

When you see a ratings-widget for a music album, for instance, do you interpret the question as: Do you like this album? (where the possible range of answers is ‘No, not at all’ up to ‘I LOVE this album!’) OR do you interpret the mechanism as ‘How much do you like this album?’ (in which case you have basically two options: either the question does not apply to you-you don’t like the album-so you don’t reply at all; or you do like the album to some degree, so you state that degree from 1-5 stars.)

I know, it probably seems like a pretty light hair to split, but it should give you some insight into how we tend to think about ratings at Yahoo. They are primarily an affirmative statement of interest, where the number of stars indicates the degree of interest.

This enables easy comparisons (a ‘1-star’ restaurant is obviously nothing to boast about compared to a 5-star establishment.) And also keeps the mechanism somewhat simpler for our users. The scale only moves in one direction.

We have other patterns (Thumbs up and Thumbs down, or different voting patterns) to let a person indicate DISlike, but we tend to employ these with caution in an effort to not promote a combative community spirit.

Again, I don’t think any of this is objectively -right- when it comes to star-ratings, and I’d encourage you to modify these base recommendations as you see fit. Remember, any design pattern is rooted in a context, and much of what we promote as best practices are really just what works for US. (And those things are sometimes driven by business considerations/prior history/etc.)

Thanks again for your question Tobias.

regards,
Bryce

What I am wondering: Why is the first Star a Star and not an X or something.
Stars are something nice. But one Star is always used for “awful”/”bad” — thats a misinterpretations, isnt it?

I think a votebar should look like this:
x = bad
* = all right
** = good
*** = very goog
**** = excellent

This also show: Bad doent have to be rated. Bad means “dont show again”. Everything else sould be used to find the good stuff…
There are some examples out there that use the X but I have no URL right now.

What I am interested in: why do use use the first Star for awful?
Dont you believe the user would understand the X?

~Tobias