Experience Planner

A few years ago, I listened to a very interesting podcast called The Architecture of Participation. It was a panel discussion that took place at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, 2004. During the talk, the Chief Technology Officer from Amazon, Allan Vermeulen, described his team’s approach for using ratings and reviews on the site:

“So our choices [on Amazon] are: either we can hire a bunch of people who sort of know how to get things done and that can write a bunch of guides and so on, on the net; or what we can do is build a technology so that everybody else out there who actually know this stuff better than we do, can go ahead and write about it and build these guides and push them out to people.”

This podcast brings up a very important fact: most online reputation systems are built with user-generated content. Amazon does not rely on experts to assign ratings to its products. Instead, the site uses a platform that is capable of capturing users’ inputs in many ways. Ideally, Amazon’s reputation system becomes more effective as more users contribute to the site. By combining multiple and diverse opinions, Amazon is able to filter the entire catalog, narrowing the list of options for each customer. As I mentioned on my previous post, ratings-and-reviews can provide guidance and therefore, improve decision making.

It is important to note that just because reputation systems allow users to send feedback it does not mean that users will actually do it. In an interesting study about ecommerce, Jared Spool compared the number of reviews for the book Harry Potter 7 on different sites, including Amazon, Target, Walmart and Barnes & Noble. One month after the book’s release, Amazon had the largest number of reviews – 1805 -  in contrast with Target, which had the smallest number -  just 3. Both sites use the same platform to offer product recommendations, despite the huge difference in the amount of user feedback captured by each.

Even though ratings-and-reviews are becoming increasingly popular and expected, designers should remember that this functionality does not rely on technology alone. Users have to be motivated in order to participate, and each community fosters participation in a different way. As noted in the example above, some communities are more active than others. And because user feedback is the foundation of most reputation systems, an early challenge for sites like Amazon or Target is in creating engagement.

Still, there are alternative methods for capturing user feedback. On my next post, I’ll talk about a smart approach for assigning reputation values to entities.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).