Having a slider requires a more-sophisticated data analysis, because different people use different rating scales. Typically psychologists use a multi-point scale, then use Rasch analysis (also called multi-item response theory) on the data.
I would say from my experience that a 5-point scale is not big enough; almost everything gets 3 or 4 points, except from the people (about 2% of raters) who binarize the scale by giving everything either a 1 or a 5. Also, people will not use negative ratings, so don’t try to center them on zero. People (or at least Americans) just can’t say “zero is average”.
My instinct would be to have the numbers not be visible to the user. You just have a rectangle with two colors, initially red on the right side and green on the left side. Clicking anywhere inside the rectangle changes the dividing line to be at that location. So clicking 90% of the way towards the right would make the left 90% be green and the right 10% be red. The backend would know that it corresponds to whatever number it corresponds to (+80 according to the scheme I gave earlier), but the user just has a qualitative feel for how much of the mass they’ve allocated to the good (green) color and how much to the bad (red) color.
As you hover over the rating button, the text below changes to indicate what that rating would mean. Zero stars means “don’t bother”, one star means “good enough to stay visible”, two stars means “above-average” and so on
Allow half stars for more information.
We would use percentile score to make the best use of the votes of binarizing voters without giving them more influence than high-information voters.
Having a slider requires a more-sophisticated data analysis, because different people use different rating scales. Typically psychologists use a multi-point scale, then use Rasch analysis (also called multi-item response theory) on the data.
I would say from my experience that a 5-point scale is not big enough; almost everything gets 3 or 4 points, except from the people (about 2% of raters) who binarize the scale by giving everything either a 1 or a 5. Also, people will not use negative ratings, so don’t try to center them on zero. People (or at least Americans) just can’t say “zero is average”.
My instinct would be to have the numbers not be visible to the user. You just have a rectangle with two colors, initially red on the right side and green on the left side. Clicking anywhere inside the rectangle changes the dividing line to be at that location. So clicking 90% of the way towards the right would make the left 90% be green and the right 10% be red. The backend would know that it corresponds to whatever number it corresponds to (+80 according to the scheme I gave earlier), but the user just has a qualitative feel for how much of the mass they’ve allocated to the good (green) color and how much to the bad (red) color.
Two things you could do about that:
As you hover over the rating button, the text below changes to indicate what that rating would mean. Zero stars means “don’t bother”, one star means “good enough to stay visible”, two stars means “above-average” and so on
Allow half stars for more information.
We would use percentile score to make the best use of the votes of binarizing voters without giving them more influence than high-information voters.