one star
The reviews section of any online marketplace should be the best source for gathering personal opinions on items you're interested in purchasing. With any online market there is room for errors and the attraction for people to game the system. One such problem is the unethical practice of companies hiring people to post raving reviews of their products on forums and in the reviews sections of online markets. I however I have come across another problem which could skew the average rating of a product, and that's the one star review.
I've realized this is most prominent in the Apple App Store. This is only because the App Store is the only store I browse almost daily looking for new apps for my device. Now the problem I've found on the App Store is that people will leave great reviews for an app, but only give it one star. This could be a "heat of the moment" thing where they're so wrapped up in writing their reviews they forget to hit the corresponding star to represent their attitude. One thing that bothers me is how often does this happen and what effect does it have on the average star rating? The effect is probably negligible, but can be confusing for those comments that bubble to the top of the list. Someone may just browse by star rating and while skimming the top of the list of comments see a couple of "one star" reviews. Being as lazy as they want to be, these individuals may just dismiss the app and go on to buy something like "Monkey Pee Jungle Fire" or the full version of Twitteriffic (LoL). This is all just speculation and most likely has no overall effect on an apps sales, just an interesting observation.
Monday, March 23, 2009 at 11:11PM
Reader Comments (2)
good point man! I would never deal with that on my site! Go to www.shamrocknews.com now!!!!
You know that reminds me of something that happened with my gym a year ago. They sent out an email survey asking us to rate them on a variety of things such as variety of equipment, cleanliness, staff, etc.
The rating choices were A, B, C, D, or F. I was doing okay til I had to rate their group classes and their day care center. I have no experience with either, so I had no opinion and no basis for rating. I tried to leave these two blank, but it wouldn't let me. I debated just picking "C" since it was in the middle, but decided against it because I have no idea if those two aspects were average quality or not. Instead, I wrote the corporate office an email chastising them for not giving a N/A or similar option.
I wonder how many people went ahead and picked a random letter (probably C, but who knows?) just to complete the survey. It really skews the results and I feel bad for whoever is responsible for a department that had ratings from people who actually had no experience or opinions. Corporate never wrote me back, but a year later we got the survey again and guess what, this time there was a N/A option!