Less Typing, More Tagging: Investigating Tag-based Interfaces in Online Accommodation Review Creation and Perception

When booking accommodations such as hotel rooms or vacation houses online, users heavily rely on the experiences of prior customers through reviews. However, such reviews are often short or lacking important details since most UIs limit users to text-only input, making review creation laborious and time-consuming. The quality of the review can therefore vary, depending on the skill and intrinsic motivation of the reviewer. Instead of relying on these two variables, we explore the effects of a tag enriched UI, both for creating and presenting review information. In the process, we evaluate tags – short descriptive text snippets such as “centrally located” – as additional input components to open text fields and rating scales. These tags aim to trigger users’ memory of details and experiences and support them in creating comprehensive reviews without having to generate long texts. In an initial user study, we asked participants to generate reviews with and without the tag support. In a second user study, they evaluated reviews created with and without tags. Our results show that tags were perceived as helpful in creating reviews and increased the level of detail in the experiences reported. We discuss the implications of review quality, helpfulness, and potential limitations.