Rating

A rating is two components wearing one costume. Read-only, it reports a score that already exists: the average a product earned, the difficulty of a recipe, the strength of a match. Interactive, it is an input, and the only input whose entire range is drawn at once as a row of identical marks. Both forms use the same picture, which is why the word covers both, and why a specimen has to make clear which one it is: a rating you can click asks for an opinion, and a rating you cannot is telling you someone else’s.

Five marks is the convention, stars are the default drawing, and neither is a rule. Ten-point scales, three-point coffee-bean scales, and thumbs up or down are all ratings. What matters is that the scale is short enough to read without counting and that the marks are ordered, so a partly filled row means something at a glance. Averages need a half step or a fractional fill to be honest, since a row that rounds 4.4 up to five stars is lying about the number printed beside it. That number, and the count of votes behind it, usually belongs next to the marks: stars alone cannot say whether the score came from six people or six thousand.

The interactive form is a single choice out of a few, so it is a radio group, not five checkboxes and not five toggles. Give every mark a label carrying the whole value it sets (“4 stars”, never “star 4”), let arrow keys move through the scale, and provide a way back to nothing for a person who rated by accident. Hovering the row to preview a score is a nice touch and never the only feedback, because touch has no hover. A display-only rating should reach a screen reader as its sentence (“4.2 out of 5”) rather than as five graphics.

Watch the neighbouring words. A review is the written thing a rating is usually attached to, and the two are often confused in schemas and URLs. Apple calls the read-only form a rating indicator, which is a useful split: the indicator reports, the control collects. Ant Design ships the control as Rate. A rating is also not a measurement, however similar the filled bar looks: a score is an opinion someone recorded, so nothing about it fills up, runs out, or completes.