Ideal user experience

[aeciorc]

What are your thoughts on the ideal user experience for the extension? For a mathematically challenged user like me, I think ideally it would be a simple numerical score near the ratings that could be compared between different listings to inform the decision to buy one or the other. The score could be hovered to reveal the details and some explanation about how it's calculated and what it means, e.g "This listing has a score of 98, which means that based on the experiences of 345 buyers, you are 98% likely to give it 5 stars, 90% likely to give it at least 4 stars (...)".

I'm curious to know what everyone else's opinions are

[musicin3d]

I like a simple score, with the hover for details. We could either move the graph there, or we could make the graph thinner/shorter so it is less dominant on the page. What other details could we include?

[chrismbryant]

For me, I think the ideal experience would be for every item to have an easily-visible single number score (maybe the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval) which re-orders all the items on a page in descending order, along with a score visualization accompanying each item. When you click on the extension icon, you would be able to access a view option similar to the Gmail inbox "display density" ("default", "comfortable", or "compact"), which would adjust the prominence of the visualizations (e.g. normal size, shorter, or only available on hover). You could also adjust other settings like the color map of the visualization (e.g. to a color-blind friendly scheme, or a dark mode, etc.), or a toggle which lets you choose whether or not to re-order the items according to the score.

This opinion could definitely change as we build the extension, though. I didn't know I would want the beta distribution visualization until I saw it on the page.

[musicin3d]

Relevant comment here: https://github.com/chrismbryant/amazon-confidence-interval/issues/9#issuecomment-609360775

Relevant part:

Also, using this realization... it may be a good idea to go ahead and populate the page with the results of the average calculation, and replace them onscroll with the distribution's results. For users on a slow connection, this will give them immediately usable info that improves as the more accurate results become available. In most cases, they won't see anything happen. In some cases, there will be a small jump as the graph updates. We could use a slight fading effect to make this feel intuitive.

[musicin3d]

For the simple score, I think it should answer 3b1b's simple question: How likely are you to have a good experience? He hasn't made the next video, so I don't know how to answer that yet! :laughing:

I agree that the visualization is very compelling! I noticed one thing though: lower confidence scores stand out on the page, because the graph is larger. Is there another visualization or a tweak to this one that would have the opposite effect, where higher confidence scores are more noticeable?

I wonder if we could transform that curve into a rectangle. I'm looking at the maximum is on the x-axis; call it m. And I'm looking at how narrow the graph is. My inner audio engineer wants call that the Q, but this is a linear scale. So maybe I'll call it q. Could we create a rectangle that is m x q (transformed as needed to be visually appealing)?

We could even color the rectangle according to the simple score.