ratingscale

So many critics rate things on a one-dimensional scale of 0 to 10. Now, there are often different attributes; for instance, computer game critics might rate on four scales of "graphics", "sound", "gameplay", "price". You could say that's a four-dimensional scale, but it's really four one-dimensional scales.

What I'm proposing is a true two-dimensional scale for rating stuff. Here's how it would work. You'd have two non-negative values in the form a/b, where a is at least 0 but at most b. b represents how important this scale is for the product; a represents how good the item is on the scale. For example, say the scale was "graphics". Then:

10/10 : "This game has awesome graphics that really make the game enjoyable." 0/1 : "This game has crappy graphics, but when you play this game, you don't care about graphics." 1/8 : "This game has poor graphics, which really detracts from the game." 3/6 : "Not much to say about the graphics; they contribute a bit but they're pretty average."

Two advantages to this system: (1) Critics no longer have to feel uneasy when their ratings system doesn't do a critiqued-item justice. For instance, say a movie critic has a scale for "Plot" (because it's important for a good movie to have a good plot). But say the critic just watched a really good action flick with a crappy plot, but still enjoyed it. The critic could plump a "0/2" on the "Plot" scale, and now the other scales are shown to be more important. (2) You can use arithmetic to combine several scales to get an overall rating. For instance, if you added all the first numbers to all the final numbers, you'd get a true rating that weights the importance of each scale in the critic's view (instead of most current systems, where adding 'em up forces you to treat all scales equally). You can even give users a customized scale; for instance, say a user thinks "sound is really important for me in a computer game". He could get a customized review for him where all the sound scores are "scaled up double", i.e., 1/3 becomes 2/6, 5/10 becomes 10/20, 8/8 becomes 16/16.

Another tangent: some web sites like using color to represent their scales. Usually they vary the hue; for instance, a site might use red for crappy, and green for great. We could represent the "importance" number by saturation; so as the scale becomes less important, the color becomes greyer and greyer.