Dollar Signs, Dollar Signs, Dollar Signs!!!

By Matt in Information Design, Constructive Criticism, Usability

We don’t think you should use dollar signs to indicate the price of an eating establishment. It’s too ambiguous and deliberatively uncommunicative to be very useful, and it needlessly conceals one of the most important factors in making a dining decision.

Want some reasons why we think so? Well, here you go:

• There’s no consistency across the myriad websites that have decided to perpetrate this disaster of information design — what should be shorthand always needs to be supplemented with some sort of popup that explains the approximate value range that each group of dollar signs represents.
• The strategy suffers even more when it is out of context. Google search results quite ingeniously display excerpts from each individual page, which are concordanced around your keywords. It is these snippets which guide your decision to click on a page or ignore it as irrelevant. Searching for “greek restaurant honolulu” returns results with useless strings of dollar signs littered everywhere; it’s just not helpful when you’re skimming results looking for grub. You want to know which pages feature Greek restaurants with meals that cost $8–12, not ones with meals that cost two dollar signs.
• The definitions of “cheap” and “expensive” are entirely subjective. A $30 dinner may seem completely reasonable to a working professional, but to a college student, for example, it’s a complete deal breaker. Prices differ significantly in different geographic areas, too.

We’ll pick on Yelp for our constructive criticism this time around, because they sprung to mind (and to the top of our search results page), and because they provide a perfect example.

It’s okay to include a popup to explain how the price strata were established and assigned, but in this case it’s completely unnecessary to enforce that level of indirection — the ambiguous iconography should just be changed to what the symbols represent. (At least, though, Yelp explains what the dollar signs mean — neither Frommer’s nor New York Magazine give even a clue as to what a three–dollar-sign restaurant translates into in real dollars.)

But, this post isn’t really just about dollar signs in restaurant reviews. The general problem here is that the symbols serve very little purpose, except to cloak information and degrade communicative efficacy. The string ‘$30–$50′ takes up precious little more space than ‘$$$$’. Why would you not just include the information itself rather than a placeholder for it? On a map, for example, where information is correlated to coordinates with absolute spatial interpretations, it may very well be prudent to succinctly condense information with symbols. However, a table of results or a restaurant detail page are not maps or graphs — their design should be crafted to expose the information they need to communicate. In these cases we think you should consider very carefully the reasons for employing a scheme that requires further explanation. If you find your interface needs a legend embedded somewhere, that should set off warning bells. There’s usually always room to be clear.