Zite is a pretty awesome self-learning, self-evolving intelligent specie(app) in the app universe. He feeds you with content gathered from Internet and devour your rating (Like/Dislike) so he can evolve into a clone of your news taste. The more rating you give him, the faster and stronger he’ll evolve, and you’ll be fed with better quality universe essence (selected content).
Well, enough of my ‘crappy’ Syfy analogy. Zite has always been my favorite news aggregator. The minimalism design and the personalized rating system make it perfect for my daily news consumption. The app got an upgrade lately and I found the rating UI also evolved a bit, and I love the changes.
Before:
Zite displays a ‘rating bar’ on the bottom of the screen, where user can ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the content. The ‘liked’ content will be fed to the user more often, while the ‘disliked’ less. It’s a simple and effective user interface:
User can touch the ‘thumbs up’ button to ‘like’ and ‘thumbs down’ button to ‘dislike’.
After:
The new UI looks the same, but adds another rating layer when you touch the ‘thumbs up’ button:
If you like the content on the page by touching the ‘thumbs up’ button, the rating bar will expand upwards and display multiple tags related to the page. You can further specify which tag represent the reason for your ‘like’, so Zite could know more precisely what part of the content you like and feed you more in the future.
Summary
Content rating system has become more and more important for all the content providers. Great content is no longer great enough for today’s indulged users. As a content provider, you need to offer great personalized content. And to do that, you need to have a powerful and easy to use content rating system to learn your user’s taste. The system needs to powerful enough so it can efficiently pinpoint user’s like and dislikes, but not making the experience too complicated so user will get overwhelmed. That’s why ZITE’s new UI did such a great job. Simple and intuitive 2-steps UI that nailed the sweet point of the content for the user.
Maybe Netflix, YouTube and other content providers could all take one page or two from ZITE’s UI playbook.
Design With Soul 
Thanks for the great analysis of our new refinement feature and for noticing the work we’ve been putting into the app recently. If you have any requests or suggestions, I’m all ears!
-Mark Johnson, CEO of Zite
You are welcome. Zite is my favorite news reading app and I enjoyed using it everyday. Thanks for bringing the awesome reading experience and I believe personalization is the direction for future news consumption. Zite is really leading on this front.
When I have more time, I’m thinking of writing another blog post on Zite’s design, with a more extensive focus on ‘taste refinement’ UI. Maybe I can interview with some of the great designers in Zite then?