Like/Dislike Rating is Probably Right For You

What rating system should you use?

Let’s start with this, Like/Dislike and 5 or 10 stars ratings are both okay.

Now, why would you use 5-star rating? Because basically binary isn’t enough. If you have a book rating system, you can’t just say that you liked this book or you hated it. A proper rating here is necessary, actually, for books a review is a must when you rate a book. Like for example, it’s kind of impossible to rate a 10-hours reading content in a binary decision. Not to mention that it’s not fair for for other publications to be rated on a scale that doesn’t differentiate between their signature points.

Let’s for example discuss two books (Those are examples, books names are courtesy of my imagination):

1- Ali Leads A Better Life

2- Life is A Cookie Jar

As you can see, those two books are totally not real, and randomly generated ratings for both of them. The 5-star rating criteria was:

1: Poor, 2: Okay, 3: Good, 4: Excellent, 5:Perfect

1 and 2 result into ‘0' (Dislike) in binary representation, 3, 4 and 5 result into ‘1' (Like) in binary representation. The twenty randomly generated numbers fall into the range of 1-5 and based on the previous mapping between 5-star rating and binary rating, the result was:

1- Ali Leads A Better Life got a total of 61 out of 80, and 3.81 rating.

2- Life is A Cookie Jar got a total of 53 out of 80, and 3.31 rating.

While both got the same result in binary rating system! This doesn’t mean that it’s a common pattern that they get the same rating, it just means that it’s not consistent in this matter. Therefore the conclusion was that it’s more appropriate to use this rating system when it comes to rating a specific field like books, movie and sellers in eCommerce website.

Even though I encourage using 5-star rating system in the example before, yet it’s not flawless. 5-star rating is really confusing, and might affect the user-experience. The breakdown isn’t clear and can be interpreted differently from person to another and there’re always those who don’t give straight 5s even if it’s well-deserved. Also, 5-star rating sometimes doesn’t help when the matter is abstract, let’s imagine if Facebook did implement 5-star rating instead of just Like, it’d be disaster. Every single Facebook post is different from another, and you can’t rate with a hidden criteria. Instead, Facebook used Like because it’s more humane, personal and works well with abstract posts.

Using binary rating system is generally better and more acceptable. It’s easier for you to decide whether you like something or dislike it, unlike building a criteria to decide a decimal between 1-5. YouTube converted from the 5-star rating to Like/Dislike in 2009 because they found out that people usually either give 5 or 1.

Binary system works brilliantly with abstract/general matters, like for example YouTube, you rate funny clips, football goals and song covers in the same day. You can’t build a criteria to decide a decimal between 1-5 if matters are different, you shouldn’t rate a song cover because the recording was nice.

TL;DR

Use 5-star rating when the domain is small and the rating criteria is clear.

Use binary rating when the domain is large and you can’t build a criteria for rating.

Finally, both of them are okay, even though I usually encourage using binary rating for anything but I guess justice must be served.