GoMore used to have a rudimentary rating system. When searching for a car you'd see an ocean of little yellow five-stars. Colourful? Yes. Useful? No. Prospective renters were left with no way of differentiating the quality of listings.
“Someone has to do something about this”—I muttered
to myself
Luckily my boss had literally just asked me to "do something about this". So I grabbed myself a can of Danskvand from the fridge downstairs, rolled up my sleeves and got to work.Translates to "Danish water", bizarrely this is what Danes call sparkling water.
I carefully read articles on UX best practices, I rather hastily skimmed an academic paper titled "Rating mechanisms among participants in sharing economy platforms", I benchmarked competitors, best-in-class companies and every thing in-between. I scoured message boards, amused by the passionate ramblings from both sides of the peer-to-peer playing field.
We re-built our ratings system from the ground up. Starting with the way we gather ratings, we introduced new communications; including messaging in the product, and push notifications and emails off-platform.
In addition to the pre-existing overall rating, we introduced three new categories. Pleasingly they all begin with "C": Cleanliness, Condition and Communication. We decided not to factor these into the overall rating. After all, a cheap and cheerful rust-bucket removals van could still be a five-star experience. It's all about expectations.
When leaving a rating we prompt users to send a private note before they leave a public review. This acts as an initial "vent" for frustrations and allows details irrelevant to the public to be shared privately without cluttering the reviews section on a listing.
Furthermore we decided to make accompanying review text compulsory if the overall rating was less than 5 stars, ensuring any negative ratings had to be justified with a reason, providing much needed context to any would-be renters.
Now we would have more ratings, and more useful information to show-off. It was just down to how we choose to display it.
We introduced a decimialised overall rating instead of rounding-up out of 5. In fact we really deliberated about how many decimal places to support. We added rating summary visualisations, and also introduced filtering (Who doesn't love reading the one-star reviews when considering a purchase?).
GoMore now has a much richer rating and review eco-system, and crucially customers can make better informed decisions on the platform. But of course, nothing is ever finished...
Should the receiver of a review be allowed to respond to it publicly? Should cancelled bookings show up in the reviews section? Should there be an extra decimal point in the rating?
You tell me.