Up Front: For These Reviewers, It's All in the Stars

If you're like most readers, you come to PC World each month mainly to stay informed about the latest hardware, software, and Web services. And if you're looking for a quick impression of the products we review, you may appreciate the magazine's new Star Ratings system.

The ratings, which debuted last month, provide an instant read on our view of a product. PC World's writers and editors do a hands-on evaluation and then assign each item a rating from zero to five stars based on its quality, flexibility, utility, ease of use, and other criteria.

The system appears simple--so much so that you might think it was easy to devise and implement. We wish! Like most apparently simple systems, the stars conceal a good deal of thought and effort, and I thought you might enjoy a peek into the process and the people behind it.

"We know from reader surveys, focus groups, and the popularity of our Top 100 charts that people like informed opinions about the products they might buy," explains Reviews Executive Editor Tracey Capen. "So we wanted a system that would convey our bottom-line feeling about a product--whether we would buy it ourselves, whether we would recommend it to a friend."

Under Capen's guidance, staffers from several departments (including his Reviews group, pictured above) drew up custom worksheets for hundreds of products. When evaluating a monitor, for example, editors might give more points for lively colors and great controls, and then assign fewer points for fuzzy text. The resulting star rating appears both in the magazine and on the Web site (see the three-star rating awarded to the Cornerstone Peripherals p1650).

All of the products in our monthly Top 100 section go through even more rigorous laboratory screening in the PC World Test Center. That's why the Top 100 charts include both stars and a numerical overall score that precisely weighs in price, performance, and other key categories (see Top 10 21-Inch Monitors for an example). As you'll see in the charts, there's a date alongside a rating if the stars were awarded in a previous month. If no date is present, we awarded the rating this month.

We hope that the Star Ratings system proves useful to readers who buy for their business or for themselves. You can write to Tracey about this or any other subject at tracey_capen@pcworld.com, or to me at eddir@pcworld.com.