Uber will soon make riders choose the reason they gave a four-star rating or lower

As part of its ‘180 Days of Change’ commitment to drivers, Uber is changing the way riders input driver ratings.

Instead of just punching in the number of stars without any comment, you’ll need to provide your reasoning for anything under a perfect score. While this might sound labour intensive, Uber provides pre-made options underneath the star rating such as ‘cleanliness,’ ‘navigation’ or ‘price.’

That last criteria, price, provides a strong argument for the new system, since drivers can’t control price, but may be rated negatively after a costly ride anyway.

Uber says that if a driver receives a bad rating based on something out of their control — a bad GPS route or traffic — then it will omit that rating from the driver’s overall score. It’ll also omit bad ratings from customers who consistently give bad ratings.

The ride-hailing company even says it has applied these protections to past trips, though without the required rationale for bad ratings in the past, its difficult to say how much that will affect drivers’ score.

Uber is making other changes to ratings as well. Users will now see text underneath the star rating describing exactly what it means, so there’s no confusion in what a certain star rating means.

Additionally, users will no longer see their updated ratings until they’ve rated their driver, so there can be no vengeful ratings from users who feel scorned by a negative rating from their driver.

Uber says these change will take effect for all trips by December 2017, but won’t effect food delivery service UberEATS.

Source: Uber