I have a problem with ratings in iTunes, as well. I've grown a couple hundred songs in my library over time, but about 98% of my library is either not rated or 5. I wouldn't really have any 1s in iTunes, or it wouldn't be there, so that rules out one whole point in the scale.
What would be really nice is if they captured the relationship of different songs to each other. I tend to listen to iTunes in "sessions", so when I sit down for a few hours to work, I play "work songs". I have a work playlist, but it's incomplete, and I just don't have time to keep moving new songs into it. I also want different types of music depending on what kind of work I'm doing, and can't think of obvious names for different lists. If iTunes could somehow pay attention to what songs I play multiple times, and which songs I skip, in a given session, then let me play that as a playlist, I wouldn't have to manually rate them or move them over to a list myself. Over time iTunes would have compilations based on different moods and could grow them by recognizing when I'm playing songs out of a particular list. Wishful thinking, I know =] Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Koren Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 11:37 PM Cc: ixd-discussion Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Your favorite rating interface Even a Likert scale doesn't mean the same thing to users. There's plenty of users that rank everything 5 stars, others that rank items only 1 star or 5 stars. Even in my own experience a Likert scale can be problematic. I decided to rate all my songs on iTunes. I decided I'd try to bell curve it with: 1: absolute crap, or non music track 2: don't like it 3: perfectly acceptable 4: like it 5: sublime This worked for a while, until I started to realized that there would be two songs that I liked, but weren't sublime, but I preferred one to the other. I couldn't capture that relationship. In a sense, a 7 point scale would have been better here, but I suspect I would have ended up with wanting a 9 point scale. -- Jonathan Koren [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~jonathan/ ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
