Ever noticed this subtle yet thoughtful design detail on UC’s rating screen?
It uses half-star increments on a 5-point scale. Not the industry standard 1-5 stars most apps use. There's a science behind it.
UC services are fundamentally different from food deliveries or taxi rides. A salon service takes 1 hour. An AC repair takes even longer. These are high-touch, long-form experiences where dozens of micro-interactions happen. Yet we, as customers, often rate them with the same mental model we apply to a 30-minute food delivery.
When a beautician spends 90 minutes with you, but you're slightly unhappy about one small thing, you might instinctively think "4 stars" (like you would for a late delivery).
But then you see 4.5 as an option. You pause. "Actually yeah, 4.5 is more fair." That 0.5 difference? It's not just half a point. It's the system helping you express nuance - and protecting professionals from the binary harshness they don't deserve for complex, hour-long services.
It shields service professionals from our own rating biases.
You might ask: Why not just do 1-10? A 1-10 numeric scale with whole-number increments lacks the cultural anchoring necessary for service ratings. People are used to 5-star ratings. So you have to cleverly work around this psychology. UC’s system does justice to both the partners’ work and users’ conditioned rating behaviors.
“What's different about our use case? What behavioral patterns should we account for?”
When you ask yourself this question, you will realize that services that take 60-120 minutes deserve rating systems that match their complexity.