Ratings are everywhere. Whether it is movies, or restaurants or gadgets or services, we all need ratings. They serve a specific purpose and determines the likeability of the person that rates it, but more importantly it helps the other people to take a decision whether or not they should avail that particular product or service. Ratings are there because most of the times it cannot be a simple yes or no about whether a person liked it or disliked it. It cannot be that simple. Let’s say there are 10 people who did not like it and 25 who liked it, you cannot have a sort of a yes or a sort of a no.
One of the most popular services that we use today is Zomato – for food ordering, and this is exactly how it works. Thousands of people rate restaurants, and the restaurant gets a rating which is cumulative of all the votes. I’ve been a very active user of Zomato for the last few years, and until recently they had a rating system of 1 to 5, with an interval of 0.5, i.e. you could vote 3 , 3.5 , 4 , 4.5 etc. but recently they have changed it to only the whole numbers, i.e. 1,2,3,4,5 which is a bit unnerving.
I know that a most platforms have just the whole numbers from 1 to 5, but there are others like IMDb which have 10 options (1 to 10). Now let’s say you totally loved the movie except for one little fault and you’re almost about to rate it a 10 but then you are thinking that you should make it a little less, i.e. you rate it 9. Now let’s consider that 9 wasn’t there so you have to give either 8 or 10 and now you’re in a dilemma because if you rate 8, it might be too less but at the same time, if you rate it a 10 then it might show that there was nothing that you disliked about it at all and it was a perfect movie. So in such a case what does a person do?
Now similar is the case with Zomato currently. Now when I go to a restaurant and it so happens that the restaurant was really amazing and I loved the food and almost everything was really good but there was this one little aspect which I did not like, maybe it was the parking scene or a little bit of a service factor and I don’t want to give it up perfect 5 because I don’t feel it deserves it, so usually I used to give it a 4.5 but the now the only options that I have are either 4 or 5, where a 4 seems really less and 5 seems a lot. These changes to the rating system took place in the app a while ago, but the earlier rating system was still available on the web browser. Just recently they’ve made the changes on their browser too, and you can rate only whole numbers from 1 to 5.
When we contacted Zomato about this change, they simply replied “we wanted to ease out the decision-making process for our users and at the same time – to make the rating scorecard look more structured and simple”.I don’t see how exactly are they making things simple, instead it has gotten even more difficult since the user would be in a dilemma as to what should they do in a situation that is described above.
A very important psychological factor that I would like to bring to your attention here. Most people have a particular score as the lowest acceptable rating for a restaurant, and if it is below that, they might not want to visit it. For me and most of the people I know, it is 3.5, below which become too low. There are a lot of times when the restaurant is just acceptable enough to go, but not any better than that, and I want to rate it a 3.5, but now I cannot. The irony of the situation is that Zomato actually has a filter for their search results which says “Rated 3.5+”, which is usually the “lowest acceptable rating” for users, and now rating a restaurant as “just acceptable” won’t be possible any more.
Another thing which I noticed that some users were able to use the old rating system; so perhaps it wasn’t rolled out to everyone at the same time. Or was it the older version of the app that they’re using? Does updating to the new system actually make things more difficult than easier?
Check out some of the latest tweets from other Zomato users who rate with the 0.5 increments
