LOVEFiLM don’t understand averages
LOVEFiLM have had a bit of a redesign recently, and one of the features that has been given more prominence is the chart for each film that shows the ‘Average rating breakdown’ (highlighted below).
Well, except for the fact that it doesn’t.
What it actually shows, is for each rating (on a scale of half a star, to five whole stars), the percentage of users who awarded it that rating. Which isn’t an average by any definition I’ve ever heard of.
Lack of basic maths aside, it’s also a pretty poor way of presenting ratings, which fails to make the best use of the given screen estate. Allow me to explain.
Because the whole range from zero to one hundred percent is used along the horizontal axis, there’s always going to be a lot of empty space. There would have to pretty much unanimous agreement on the exact rating of a film, down to the precise half-star, to get anything even resembling a spike. And because of the very personal nature of ratings (two people could both say they absolutely loved a film, but one would give it a four and the other would give it a five), this ain’t gonna happen. This leaves the graph looking a little, well, limp.
Even for films generally held in high regard, such as The Dark Knight (pictured), which 77% of LOVEFiLM viewers awarded 4 stars or over, the graph doesn’t look particularly impressive.
A better way to present this would be to dynamically adjust the maximum value of the horizontal axis based on the highest percentage. So in the case of The Dark Knight, the majority percentage of 37% would cause the scale to be from zero to forty percent, allowing the graph to fill up the space nicely.
IMDB understand averages. They give you the arithmetic mean AND the median. Rock.
Hi Paul
Before I say anything I should make it clear that I am and employee of LOVEFiLM and work in the user experience team (just didn’t want any confusion on that point!).
First let me say great post, and a good point. We’re aware the graph has some issues with it and will be changing it shortly. For what appears to be a simple presentation issue there are a number of complexities. We’re looking at all the options, and I’d be really interested in your thoughts.
As you suggest, we could make the horizontal axis dynamic, however the downside of this is that on visually the same percentage of people could look quite different across pages. Take the Shawshank Redemption (SR) and Gangs of New York (GNY). 45% of people gave SR 5 stars, so you’d top the chart at 50%. However opinion was fairly split on GNY and with a max of 19% of people giving it 3 stars, hence you’d top at 20%. As a result GNY would actually have far more red showing in the chart, possibly suggesting to users that more people rated it and thus that it was a more popular film.
Essentially people need to pick up the idea from a shape and if the size of that shape isn’t relative, it takes a significant amount of understanding to process that.
We could set a fixed value of 50% on the horizontal axis which would reduce the area wasted significantly on most titles. Only this falls over the first time anything gets rated (as something is bound to be at 100%) and any other time that a rating exceeds 50% - most likely with fewer ratings.
The other alternative is to rotate the axis and have it a variable height but with a fixed scale, but that then requires smaller text on the horizontal axis reducing readability.
So unfortunately not a clear answer for you, but if you’ve any more thoughts on the matter, do let me know.
Thanks again
Lucy
Thanks for your comment Lucy - I’m surprised that anybody reads this blog, so am rather flattered that someone from a site I’ve wrote about would take the time to read and reply to my post.
I suppose one way to emphasize that more red doesn’t mean more ratings had been given would be to put the number of ratings in closer proximity to the graph - the figure currently appears near the top of the page, under the film title, quite a distance away from the graph.
I should add too that apart from some minor graph niggles and pedantry about mathematical terms I do find the LOVEFilM site really easy to use on the whole!
Cheers
Paul
It’s the joy of the internet - nothing remains hidden for long!
It’s a good point about moving the star ratings closer to the ratings breakdown. We probably need to repeat it there, as it needs to be high up the page as well.
Anyway keep up the blogging!
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