| Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1366] |
Tue, 09 April 2002 23:10  |
snafu
Messages: 27
Registered: April 2002
Karma: 0
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Junior Member |
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I found the thread rating feature to be confusing. Is two stars good or bad? I thought it would mean good, but the image displayed seems to communicate otherwise, (see attachment) due to the fact that there are two stars out of five possible; i.e. a scale of one to five, where one sucks and five is awesome.
I suppose there are a couple ways to approach thread rating:
First approach: Rating on a scale from one to five, where one is bad and five is good. In this case, it might be helpful to have the options be more verbose, example:
1 star - the worst
2 stars - bad
3 stars - okay
4 stars - good
5 stars - the best
In this case it makes sense to leave the image as n out of five stars.
Second approach: Marking the thread as helpful or informative, where one star means helpful, and more stars means more helpful. Again, it might help to make the options more descriptive:
1 star
2 stars
3 stars
4 stars
5 stars
In this case it might be better to make the image not show "empty stars".
Anyways, that's my two cents. Any thoughts?
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Attachment: 2stars.gif
(Size: 0.29KB, Downloaded 725 times)
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| Re: Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1367 is a reply to message #1366] |
Tue, 09 April 2002 23:19  |
Ilia
Messages: 13241
Registered: January 2002
Karma: 0
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Senior Member
Administrator
Core Developer |
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The 1st approach you've mentioned is what was intended. I'll add some sort of a textual indicator to help people to understand what stars represent.
FUDforum Core Developer
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| Re: Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1506 is a reply to message #1504] |
Wed, 17 April 2002 22:35 |
Ilia
Messages: 13241
Registered: January 2002
Karma: 0
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Senior Member
Administrator
Core Developer |
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| snafu wrote on Wed, 17 April 2002 6:15 PM |
Great!
I did a FUD demo to a product team last Monday, and thread rating was one of the first things they asked about: they noticed the ambiguity *immediately*. (They're interested in 'harvesting' threads for use in some kind of kbase, which brings up a whole raft of issues/suggestions/RFE's that I won't pester you with right now)
Anyways, I now have these questions:
Does a thread's rating have any other impact besides making stars appear, such as adjusting prominence in search results display? If not, can I re-purpose the rating system to mean 1=slightly_good, 5=really_good, without adverse consequences elsewhere in the application? I think this would suit the purposes of a technical support forum a little better.
Let me know what you think.
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Thread rating as it is right now has no additional functionality beside showing X number of stars beside rated threads.
You can pretty safely use it for other applications without really worrying about the consequences.
FUDforum Core Developer
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