Oddbean new post about login | logout Don't you think Amazon has plenty of review data? They can verify purchases. Why do they keep using stars?
Damn near impossible to roll back a primary feature that you popularized. 😂 Everyone would totally freak out, especially as they would keep generating ratings and sorting and etc. and everyone would be creeped out. Lots of apps get stuck with emotional technical debt, like that.
Besides, they do so much computational magic on the stars that it's basically closer to what we're suggesting. They only count the stars directly, if they think the rating makes sense and is useful. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-stars-ratings-calculated/
I don't care about what Amazon does with stars. I just want a 5 star rating for books. You guys can do whatever you want with the system for other stuff... But every book app I've used has a 5 star rating system that I tend to prefer for reasons stated below.
“emotional technical debt” Nothing is purely technical and nothing is purely emotional. https://media.tenor.com/B-TP3rs3l7IAAAAC/memory-cant-remember.gif
People get emotionally attached to UX. Like how there are often fields in online forms that the company doesn't need, but they have to put them there because people get upset if they aren't there. So, they just collect it and store it, but don't use it.
Yup, exactly why 80% percent of the time copying Big Tech UI/UX isn't a graat idea. We have a chance to do something new here, where the user has to perform and understand way less actions. Big tech can only dream of letting their users reply on, zap and share literally everything, so they invented a bunch of proxy features. They had to make these features look and feel like lottery machines because otherwise no one would even use them. We don't have that problem. If you do, you're designing it wrong. Replying, sharing and zapping are examples of some if the most natural UX you can find.
