Member-only story

The Problem With Online Reviews

The good, the bad and the ugly

Eugen Eşanu
UX Planet
9 min readOct 31, 2018

I often take my coffee at a place with a 3 stars rating on Google, but it serves one of the best coffees in the city. The reviews come from two people who had once a bad experience. And Google shows to everyone that it has 3/5 stars without saying that it is one the best places to have a non-Starbucks, coffee.

Some companies keep manufacturing certain products only because 10 years ago they received so many 5 stars on Amazon, that it’s almost impossible to retire the product.

My Uber score is 4.7, and the only “bad thing” I do is the lack of conversation with my driver. I always say “Hello”, “Thank you”, “Goodbye” and leave some tips. So apparently for not talking you still get a low score.

For drivers, sometimes all you need is a grumpy passenger who is not allowed to smoke and will give you a one star for that. And then you have to work hard for a month to recover your initial score. Only because somebody wasn’t allowed to do what he wants.

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Responses (15)

What are your thoughts?

And we translate that into a number? A number which has a different meaning from person to person?

Here I think there’s a big difference that is the sample size.
When you talk about a review on a cafe I agree that the emotion bias plays a big role on the rating, but when we’re talking about Facebook and millions of users giving the rate we have a…

You got my subjective rating of 50 claps for this article! 😂👍

The rating system generates a distorted reality. It’s like one bad apple
spoil the whole damn bunch.
People tend to write more about negative experiences. Thus, rating systems spawned entire business industries that offer fake reviews, bots, etc…