I was really pleased to see that Yahoo took a big step in moving the usability of the entire web forward today with their release of Yahoo Design Patterns.
They are descriptions of everyday web design problems and what Yahoo! has found works in attempting to overcome them. Written in a plain, no-nonsense manner they form a strong guideline for how web appliatications should be put together.
Their Rating an Object pattern caught my eye as it specifies something I didn’t consider for OneToFive: text descriptions of ratings. I would guess (but haven’t seen any data) that you could profoundly influence the group rating behavior by mapping different labels to the stars. Just imagine the impact on how ratings would be distributed if Netflix labeled the 5 star rating: “One of your Top 10 movies of all time”.
This is at once a strong argument both for and for not caring what a user rates something as. If you believe that systems will find their organic mean simply by the repeated use of ratings then you’re in good shape, but if you need a little more structure maybe labels are the way to go.