Saturday, November 05, 2005

Rating improved; half-stars added

Update: It's working on everything now. No errors, I rpomise.

I liked the way I stars worked, but I was in the minority. You no longer need to click five times to give a book five stars. Little gray dots now show up showing you where to click.



In another change, the system now allows half stars. I'm still torn on this topic. (Somehow it feels more choice made the decisions harder, not easier!) But big-time book blogger (and Classicist!) Debra Hamel wanted it, as did some others.



It's pointless to explain something like this. Just fiddle with it. You'll find one click makes a star, another makes a half star, a third zeroes-out the stars. Incidentally, everyone said I should copy iTunes. I largely did, but it has no way to zero out the stars. Once you give a song a rating, you're stuck giving it some rating or other. What the heck!

If you're not viewing your own catalog, stars show up without the guide-dots, e.g.,



Comments encouraged. They don't call it user-centered software design for nothing.

22 Comments:

Blogger Wendy said...

Yay! Thank you. :)

11/05/2005 6:54 AM  
Blogger James Brush said...

Stars are addictive and I had to force myself to stop rating my catalog. I love the half-stars idea, but I'm having the same problem as sharon g. Thanks again for LT and for listening to your users. This is great!

11/05/2005 8:05 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Stars are a fine graphic inclusion, yet, if you are using symbols (with fractions [1/2]) you should include the ability to click on a graphic of a lemon. Some books do not even deserve one star.

11/05/2005 8:30 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim,
I am also having trouble with the rating system. In adding and editing a book I discovered that the rating was not going into the catalog although the other changes were. Also, I'm not getting the half stars and I wasn't able to unrate the book without going to edit and choosing unrated. (Which, now that I think about it, doen't make sense.)
I'm using MAC OS 9.1 and IE 5.0.
hailelib (pwh)

11/05/2005 9:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow, you need to stop improving this thing! I'm never going to get anything done! :)

11/05/2005 11:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what is it about classicists and book cataloging? :)

11/05/2005 11:48 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

First, my apologies for it not working on everything. I already learned my lesson about naming iframes in Javascript. Grr... It looks to me like it works now.

Second, the lemon idea is a good one.

11/05/2005 12:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm not in favour of the new half stars. I do like the way Amazon does it. You can only rate with whole stars but when the system shows the average rating it can show half stars. I honestly feel this is vastly better - otherwise we may as well just have ten stars.

11/05/2005 2:18 PM  
Blogger NL said...

Starring notions, especially viz. lemons and 5-stars, can vary widely between people. To compromise with this I included a short description of my starring criteria in my profile. Perhaps a good idea for others...

11/05/2005 6:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"No errors, I rpomise."

Thought this was funny.

Seriously, I like the new feature

11/05/2005 6:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think its great, and its a choice people not something forced, if you dont want 1/2 then don't use them.

Having the option there for those that want it is great.

11/06/2005 7:49 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the "lemon" idea has some merit. You do currently have to think about the whole area of "no stars" vs "unrated" vs "1 star". I've been using "1 star" for a negative review.

I think it might be an idea to tooltips mouseover popups saying some version of:
1 star: didn't like it
2 stars: not very good
3 stars: liked it
4 stars: very good
5 stars: excellent

That would clear up that 1 star is a negative vote rather than "liked it a tiny bit"

11/06/2005 8:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim, the only way I can get the half stars is to use the edit windoow. Clicking on the star multiple times doesn't do anything. I am using Win2K with the latest version of IE.

11/06/2005 9:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Same problem as Anonymous . . . I'm using IE6, latest version of XP, and can't get the half stars to work apart from editing them directly.

11/06/2005 10:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yeah, lemons are a good idea.

11/06/2005 1:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh no. Half stars. Save me from myself! I'm gonna pretend they're not there... ;)

On an unrelated note, two suggestions for minor improvements:

1. For "Recommendations based on this book", It would be cool if we could click on the (owned in common/total owned) part of the listing and see which other users who own the current book own the recommended book.

2. I use tags so that intersections of two tags give me a more specific topic, e.g. "education" plus "policy" rather than "education policy" as a single tag. If we could view intersections of tags a la del.icio.us, that would be useful to me.

11/06/2005 1:39 PM  
Blogger N. Trandem said...

Another idea: could you add a "library" to the Add books tool that would let you query against LibraryThing itself? I know I had to input quite a few books manually, and I occasionally discovered after entering them that other people also had them in their libraries.

11/06/2005 2:41 PM  
Blogger AbbotOfUnreason said...

What about author cloud? When will author cloud work?

11/06/2005 3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Y'know, I've never quite gotten the whole "cloud" thing in folksonomies. If the cloud somehow showed the relationships between various tags, that I'd get. But all the implementations I've seen just seem to make one tag more prominent than another based on its frequency. And what's the big deal in that? What am I missing?

Following up on my comment above, the kind of visualization that I'd think was neat would be if I could select groups of tags and see a Venn diagram kind of thing so I could see how much various tags overlapped, and select appropriate intersections.

11/06/2005 3:43 PM  
Blogger Ed said...

Searching LT itself in Add Books. That's a great idea.

11/06/2005 4:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just a correction: you can zero out the stars in iTunes. You click in the rating area and drag the mouse to the left and it takes away the stars until there are none. Voila.

11/06/2005 6:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm also having trouble using half stars now, although I used them when I first logged on. Any thoughts?

6/12/2006 9:46 PM  

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