What fresh Hell is this, huh? I bet you didn’t get yourself out of bed this morning to see this kind of malarkey.

Well let’s just - phew - let’s just take a moment to recognize and be thankful that this isn’t happening in the United States (so that’s most of you readers, I’d presume). But they got Canada! They got Canada.

Who’s They?

Whatsamatter? Didn’t you read the article title? It’s a little (read: international) food delivery service called Just Eat Takeaway.com, or Skip the Dishes if you’re in Canada.

Similar to your standard GrubHub or DoorDash, Just Eat lets hungry users browse through restaurants in their area, order the food they find delightful, then get it delivered right to their door by someone in a snazzy orange outfit:

Those appear to be drivers in one of Just Eats’ “scoober cities,” where they pay a fixed hourly rate and hook you up with access to electric bikes and mopeds. Of course you can use your own vehicle and choose your own hours as well.

Hang on! They’re sedating me with their lovely warm orange branding. We’re here to tear into them, so now that we know who and what they are, let’s get tearing!

They Use Six Stars!

Look at it! Your mind has been trained for so long to quick-read situations and instantly process star-ratings, but now, this! Look at this:

These are the overall star-ratings of a few restaurants. And it is absolute madness.

Apparently, if I’m to believe the meandering explanations of UX Designer and researcher Mark Davies (who happens to point out how people said they liked five-star systems better), these six stars stand for:

• 1 star = abysmal

• 2 stars = poor

• 3 stars = average

• 4 stars = good

• 5 stars = great

• 6 stars = perfect (later changed to 'outstanding' based on user testing)

My current thought is if something is abysmal, people generally want to use the word to really twist the knife. Or - and here’s a wild idea - this is a situation where I’d design the UX to let users put half or zero stars. Maybe that’d lead to review-bombing madness, but at least the five star standard would be mostly maintained!

According to Davies, the system is kinda flawed anyway (at least at his time of writing), since users aren’t merely asked to rate the food and service as one, but are asked to rate food, service, and delivery separately, the average of which is their star rating. That results in the following (lifted straight from his site; come at me if you want, bro!):

So two people loved the food, one didn’t, two had good delivery, one didn’t, and two had good service, and one didn’t. And they all ended up with the same general rating, based off of their unique situations.

Ready for more twistiness? You know, not every place let’s you do half stars, and I’m not sure Just Eat does. But they still allow results like this:

So we’ve got three and a half stars, we got four and uh- less than half, and we got, oh. Uh, four and, pretty much five?

Now sure, these are the overall restaurant ratings, the averages from ALL the reviews, it’s not like one single person’s-

You knew it was going to get this bad, didn’t you? I knew, and I didn’t warn you.

An email has been sent to Just Eat in the hopes that they might be able to explain themselves. If they do respond, this post will be updated to reflect that.

In the meantime, let me concede that I’ve never used Just Eat. Maybe it’s great. Maybe things have changed, too. Maybe this was a rushed post, in the heat of the moment, not so different from any number of reviews that exist as little more than digital vent sessions.

And there’s a time and a place for that. But, blimey, six stars? What’s next?