New Rating System

It’s been a fascinating experience listening to user feedback on our beta release. One aspect we’ve heard about frequently is the rating system, or “overall opinion.” Initially, our goal was to keep it simple and present three basic rating options (like, dislike & indifferent), but many users have voiced an interest in greater granularity; so, we’ve changed the system. We’ve replaced the previous system with a dedicated rating slider to give users more control in expressing their opinion of a beer.

A few notes about this change:

• The values from the previous like/dislike/indifferent system will not be carried over. We decided that assigning an arbitrary value to the existing ratings would be inaccurate.
• The new rating value is now mandatory when entering a review. The rating value is another metric for comparing beers, so we feel it’s important that everyone enters it.
• The new rating value is now displayed in the beer’s profile. The method we use to calculate and display the overall rating of a beer will evolve as the dataset does, but we’re keeping it simple initially, requiring a minimum of three user ratings to calculate an average score.

We hope that those of you who have entered reviews will update them with a rating value. We’re sorry to see the like/dislike opinions go, but such is the nature of being in beta, and we’re happy we’re making this change early.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on the new rating system. Cheers!

How Beer Citizen Uses Data

It’s a question we’re asked often, and one we started with ourselves: what makes Beer Citizen different from other beer review apps? The short answer, as you may have surmised, is data. We created Beer Citizen as a new way to review beer by entering experiential data, and a new way to discover beers by leveraging that data.

Other review sites (even outside of the beer world) typically rely on written reviews or simple 5-star ratings. Written reviews are inherently subjective. By the time a beer has dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of reviews, how many do you have to read to get an understanding of what the beer is actually like? Other sites tend to use an overall rating as the main point of interest. While it tells you how much a community likes a beer, it doesn’t show you - at a glance - what you’ll experience in a beer.

Beer Citizen solves this problem by focusing on the data of the experience. By simply identifying perceived traits of a beer, and then quantifying the intensity of each, a review becomes much more useful, and more suited to explaining what a beer is like. As more people enter data for a given beer, each review factors into a beer’s overall profile. In one glance, you can see what the community as a whole thinks a beer looks, smells, tastes, and feels like. You can, of course, still enter written tasting notes (and more) with your review, but it’s the data that we believe will make Beer Citizen your go-to beer reference.

Beer Citizen is currently in beta while we collect data (from people like you) and refine the system. As we get closer to a critical mass of review data, we’ll be introducing a ton of fun and useful tools. Ideas on the horizon include:

• Discovering similar beers, based on trait data
• Comparing a beer to a style as a whole
• Comparing one style of beer to another
• Searching for beers based on desired traits

These are just a few things we have on the roadmap, but we can’t do it without data. So grab a beer, enter a review, and help beer enthusiasts everywhere find a better beer. Let’s drink!