The opinions of millions of regular people are more accessible than ever before. Reviews are particularly interesting to me, in part because so many of my decisions in my life are now affected by them. I read books based on what people say on GoodReads or Amazon. I eat at restaurants if they get great reviews on Yelp. I watch movies and TV shows based on Netflix reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has guided me plenty of times (though the critics were dead wrong about Transsiberian being good). I stay at hotels because they are rated well on TripAdvisor. Reviews have have a significant sway over me, and, based on the popularity of the aforementioned sites, I don’t think I’m alone.

I’ve been able to rely on these reviews to discover some great things…and I’ve been thrilled to design a bunch of products that utilize user-generated reviews and ratings. But I can’t help but think it’s time to step back and look at some of the flaws out there.

The wisdom of crowds (if that really exists in the way it has been hyped) has been muddled by poor design. We need to be learning from the behaviors that people have adopted and evolve the mechanisms by which people share their opinions.