While the plugin is quite nice, what really impresses me is the example page.
All to often projects do not have examples, only have screenshots of examples or have a tiny selection. Raty's example page seems to cover every thing, I have no doubt what this tool can do, or how to do it. It acts as both documentation and a sales pitch. I really wish that other open source projects took the time to demonstrate their awesomeness.
I was especially impressed to see clear examples of interactions that I haven't seen before, such as half-star ratings on mouseover, which actually works a lot better than I expected.
This is nice, but unfortunately doesn't degrade gracefully at all. This is understandable with full-page javascript apps, but getting something as small as this right is easy.
There are other problems with the 2nd plugin you noted (fyneworks.com jquery-star-rating-plugin). It has a lot of unresolved bugs. Check the Google Code Issues page: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-star-rating-plugin/issues/li... (particularly disappointed with Issue #25).
Great examples. If anything it feels like there are far too many options, but I can't remember if that's the way people like their jqueries these days!
Haven't checked out the code yet but looks like it's definitely an elegant solution with just the basic options.
Having said that... must be at least a year since YouTube switched from 5-star ratings to positive/negative ratings. Maybe it's not totally relevant here, but I'm interested in what effect the switch has on ratings..
> Having said that... must be at least a year since YouTube switched from 5-star ratings to positive/negative ratings. Maybe it's not totally relevant here, but I'm interested in what effect the switch has on ratings.
I think conceptually they are different. +/-, yes/no, thumbs up/down work best "would you recommend this?", just like "liking" or "+1"ing, or up-voting links on HN and reddit.
Star-ratings are still best for when you critique a more extensive piece of work, and may be accompanied with a review. "This book is good and I recommend it, but I think xyz is better and it lacks from these reasons, so it gets 3.5 stars."
Both are relevant and different ways of designing user-feedback, and certainly too often companies have mistakenly used 5-star rating when a binary recommendation is more appropriate.
Probably the best example is bulletin board/forum systems. They all seem to come with 5-star ratings for threads, but conceptually it makes no sense. You don't critique a conversation as "well this conversation is interesting, but not as good as this conversation, so i rate it 4 stars out of 5. OP: Next time i would recommend writing things more in this style for a certain 5-star thread next time!"
Here conceptually, you either recommend a thread ("check it out!") or vote it down ("this isn't worth your time clicking on"), a la links at reddit and answers on SO.
Most youtube videos are the same, as the vast majority are single-concept videos, be it music videos, comedy, sketches or otherwise, often just 2-3 minutes in length. Either you recommend it or you don't.
But multi-star ratings still makes sense in contexts where your review is multi-faceted. A hotel may be good for some reasons, bad for others. Longer experiences (say a vacation, extended experience with a business), and long-form media books, feature-length documentaries etc, are still appropriate for a star system.
All to often projects do not have examples, only have screenshots of examples or have a tiny selection. Raty's example page seems to cover every thing, I have no doubt what this tool can do, or how to do it. It acts as both documentation and a sales pitch. I really wish that other open source projects took the time to demonstrate their awesomeness.