Customer Reviews Feature
My role: Product Designer
Project outcome: A feature that allows users to solicit reviews from previous customers through email or a link to a review request.
overview
Background: Customer reviews are an essential part of a business's success in today's digital age. Currently, a large percent of our users don’t have any customer reviews on their profile. We want to increase the number of reviews users have to improve their chances of winning jobs and build trust with customers.
Goal: Design a feature that will enhance a user’s profile with more customer reviews.
Why customer reviews?
research
User Surveys
Two surveys were conducted. One survey was sent to service providers, our users of the product. The other survey was sent to homeowners, who hire contractors. The goal was to understand how service providers use customer reviews and where, if at all, they manage reviews. The goal for the homeowners survey was to measure the gather data about the importance of reviews when hiring a service professional.
When surveying our network of homeowners, 83% said they utilize reviews half of the time or more when hiring a contractor. Based on survey results, contractors have reviews from customers across multiple platforms.
Ideate
Before wireframing, I brainstormed solutions using Figma.
Initially I wanted users to request reviews from past customers through email. I also wanted a feature that allowed users to import reviews they may have from other sources such as Google and Facebook.
After presenting these ideas to our developers and product manager, it was decided importing reviews was out of scope for engineer this project.
I decided to focus on past customer review request. I created a flow for sending review requests emails to past customers to show the solution.
Design & Test
Sketching Wireframes & Low Fidelity Wireframes:
After market research and brainstorming, wireframes were created on Figma and presented to stakeholders.
The product is a web app. For responsive web design I always design mobile first.
Usability Testing & Feedback:
I sent a prototype to current users and conducted usability testing. I asked users to complete tasks including send a review request via email and using the link provided. Additionally, I asked users to provide general design & usability feedback.
Feedback from users that was implemented:
Shareable link needs to be more prominent.
More concise and clear directions.
Make pre-written email preview more obvious it is not editable.
Stakeholder Review
I presented wireframes to stakeholders for feedback. In addition to showing wireframes, I present user flows and specific scenarios.
High Fidelity Wireframes
For responsive web design, mobile wireframes are created first and then desktop and tablet wireframes.
IMPLEMENT & launch
After collaborating with developers and QA engineers to implement the designs, the new feature was ready to go live. To announce this new feature to our current users I used with an internal product to design a new feature modal
In addition, I worked with our marketing team to send email & SMS communication to our users announcing the feature. I also communicated with our customer service team and informed them of our new review feature and they devloped a plan to encourage users to request reviews from past customers.
results & data
Working with our data team, a report was created to track various data points including number of users with reviews, number of review requests sent, retention rate and leads won. In addition, our team uses HotJar to record user behavior and sessions. Some results since launching the new review request feature:
Percentage of active SPs who have at least one review increased from 47% to 75% (and still increasing)
Number of past customer reviews (homeowners outside of company) increased from 20 to 50 reviews per week
moving forward
I continue to track data and review recorded user behavior. Based on the success of this feature, adding review feature to our mobile app was prioritized.
The next step to improve reviews on user profiles is to import reviews from other sources including Google and Facebook.