There are actually three issues here:<p>1. Are reviewers rating the data using the right scale/format? 1-10 might mean one thing to you and something different to someone else. 1-10 might be inappropriate when you really mean a multiple choice, 1 of N text descriptions. Different types of inputs mean reviewers will <i>think about things</i> differently, and also mean you'll have to process your data differently to get an appropriate visualization.<p>2. What are browsers trying to get out of it? Maybe those ratings, or their descriptions, are helpful in the general case. Maybe they're only really helpful when someone actually wants to make a decision. Maybe browsing <i>by rating</i> instead of by product is how things should be sorted. There's any number of possibilities in how potential browsers might use your service, regardless of your intent.<p>3. Only after you know those things can you decide on an appropriate visualization, and I must warn you that something that looks really attractive and draws people in and gets people to say how awesome your site is is not necessarily the visualization that will be most useful. In addition, most-useful-at-a-glance is not the same as most-useful-after-I-understand-it or most-useful-with-a-lot-of-practice.<p>This sort of thing is why an actual designer is useful. You've got a lot of encoded assumptions and we're trained to break them down.<p>That said, to answer your question, even though it might be the wrong question, there's a great O'Reilly book called "Information Dashboard Design" which explains how to make data visualizations that are actually useful.<p>After you get through that, you might look for an old book called "Using Charts & Graphs" by Jan V. White. It's out of print, so finding a copy might be hard, but it's the opposite of the Tufte books someone will invariably suggest, but which are inappropriate for you. "Using Charts & Graphs" specifically talks about what we now call infographics: telling a story using a chart or a graph.<p>(Tufte's books are inappropriate here because they're textbooks for print people, and while they have lots of good information, implementing their takeaways in electronic form is left as an exercise to the reader. It's way too much work for this situation.)<p>You might also try to dig up the work done by Summize back in 2007/2008, before they were acquired by Twitter.<p>Finally, if you'd like to talk more about this with an actual designer, you might be interested in a design "office hours" experiment I'm running, called UX Hours: <a href="http://uxhours.com/" rel="nofollow">http://uxhours.com/</a>. For comparison, this well-defined question, resulting in advice on things to consider and two places to find out what you need to do, is just about right for a 30 minute consult.