The Design Space of Opinion Measurement Interfaces:
Exploring Recall Support for Rating and Ranking
Syavash Nobarany, Louise Oram, Vasanth Kumar Rajendran, Chi-Hsiang Chen, Joanna McGrenere, Tamara Munzner
ABSTRACT
Rating interfaces are widely used on the Internet to elicit people’s opinions. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of these interfaces and their design space is relatively unexplored. We provide a taxonomy for the design space by identifying two axes: Measurement Scale for absolute rating vs. relative ranking, and Recall Support for the amount of information provided about previously recorded opinions. We present an exploration of the design space through iterative prototyping of three alternative interfaces and their evaluation. Among many findings, the study showed that users do take advantage of recall support in interfaces, preferring those that provide it. Moreover, we found that designing ranking systems is challenging; there may be a mismatch between a ranking interface that forces people to specify a total ordering for a set of items, and their mental model that some items are not directly comparable to each other.