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This article describes the Rating mobile Design Pattern.

Contents 1 Description 2 Examples 3 Advantages 4 Disadvantages 5 Use when 6 Use how 7 Design tips

Description

Rating is a technique commonly used to allow mobile application's users to rate the application's content from within the application itself.

Examples

OVI Store client

A sample client to browse and search Italian restaurants

Advantages

This Mobile Design Pattern:

• allows users to easily rate the application's content, so giving users an instrument to promote his preferred content
• allows users to view the votes (usually the average vote) that other users gave to specific content, so helping to promote high-quality content, and thus improving the overall user experience of the application

Disadvantages

• rating requires users' votes to be transmitted over network to a remote server, that holds the votes of all users. So, access to network is required in order to implement a Rating functionality within a mobile application.

Use when

This pattern is useful for all those scenarios where the users wants to be allowed to vote application's content. Since this technique allow users to share their opinion with other application's users, it creates a "social" effect that involves users and promotes application usage.

Use how

The Rating functionality is usually implemented within the detail view of the a single content item (e.g.: songs, applications, restaurants, and so on), or in a separate view linked from the item's detail view. When implementing Rating in a separate view, the main details of the item to rate have to be clearly indicated in this other view.

The rating is usually represented by few icons (e.g.: stars) and the user has to be able to set his rating by focusing them and by pressing the LEFT/RIGHT keys of the navigation pad (for non-touch interfaces) or by directly touching the icon relative to his rating (for touch interfaces).

Design tips

• Use clear icons to indicate the rating value (typically 3 - 5 icons), avoiding any textual input to enter the vote value
• Optionally let users submit a textual review of the item currently rated, but without forcing the user to enter a review