Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action

Chapter 24. Getting a Good Rating

Five-star–rating interfaces can be seen everywhere from Amazon to Yahoo to Yelp, but the individual implementations are often done very differently.

For example, they are often split into two parts, shown in two different areas of a page. One part is the display version of the five-star interface—the one that tells users the current rating. The other part is the edit version, where users choose how they want to rate something, such as a book, a CD, or an article.

Of these interfaces, some offer explanatory text that clarifies what each star means as a rating, and that appears alongside each star when the user rolls over the star with the mouse cursor. Some require that you click a star and hit Save. Some ask only ...