As you know welovelocal.com is all about ratings and reviews, we want to find out about the places you love to use and trust. Unsurprisingly, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to rate a business and how to ensure that the ratings you provide present the truest picture of what you thought of that particular business.

Ratings are great, but they need to presented in a meaningful context. We all understand that five stars means that whatever is being reviewed is considered as something good, and one star not so good, however, without understanding how a rating correlates to the experience of the person reviewing can lead to potentially less helpful feedback.

How so? Two main reasons. Firstly, people tend to be predicated towards expressing their opinion at either end of the scale, so if you look at most review websites you’ll to find ratings at each extreme of the scale, they either love something or they hate it (take a look at Amazon the next time you’re buying books and you’ll see what I mean). Nothing ever seems to be so-so.

Secondly, very few websites actually correlate a star rating to any criteria, so one person thinks three stars means ‘good’ and another considers it to mean ‘average’. When we ran some testing earlier this year, without specifying any criteria to each star rating we also found this to be the case too.

With welovelocal.com, we have adopted a subtler approach. When you rate a business, we want you to share how your experience fared in relation to your expectation. Why? Well, the places I love may not be considered so by my mum or even my work colleagues. We all have different tastes, preferences, likes and importantly expectations. By providing a profile and reading your other reviews, locals can get a better idea what you are like and also the type of expectations you’re likely to have when you use a local business or service.

It may seem like a small thing, but we hope it will make it easier for you to trust the reviews submitted by our locals and avoid coming across endless five and one star reviews.