I’m pleased to share we added some additional functionality to the CHOICE.Community forum.
Forum members were already leaving reviews, but now you will be able to do so in a dedicated ‘Reviews’ category. The new feature allows forum members to leave a rating out of five stars, and any further ratings are then aggregated to show an average across all reviews.
If you have something to say about a particular product or service, leave a review for the CHOICE Community.
Hey Brendan
I don’t know if it is too complex, but can my suggestion is this:
If someone clicks on the ‘Review’ category, not only will it bring up stars to click on, but also a hierarchical menu of what the item is. Start at the high level and working down, for example White goods, Electronics, Services, … etc. Clicking on one (say whitegoods) would then bring up the next level of granularity, say Kitchen, Laundry, … etc. And so on.
I’m sure that you already have some sort of hierarchical system there at Choice. Use that.
This help cluster related reviews, and hopefully make it easy for users to later search for reviews, say in the event someone wants to refurbish their kitchen, they won’t have to search each item, but just head for Whitegoods -> Kitchen, and everything is there!
Additional categorisation is an interesting problem in the general sense. While one person thinks of things in one hierarchy, another person thinks a different way. For this reason, we decided that the initial release should just focus on using tags to add the additional categorisation. In the longer term, we have another huge internal project in the New Things group to allow people to find anything and get information back about it in a structured manner. This is important to so many things with where we want to go in Choice.
Just yesterday, we opened it up to the world a little database that we jokingly call The Everything Database. We’ve dropped in most of our data that CHOICE has collected over the last couple of decades, as well as integrated other sources, such as the Energy Star ratings. You can find that here. It’s horribly geeky and not at all sexy, as it is another proof of concept experiment. Mostly we are aiming for applications to make use of it, but humans can too. Free text search is the best way of avoiding categorisation hell, particularly reviews, where something like a soap holder might appear in both bathroom and kitchen.
Great idea . Sorry it told me I had to write at least 20 characters so it is a “Very Great Idea”
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Tapadh Leat
