Ratings and Reviews
Project Overview
I was tasked with designing a system within the profile order center for users to view all the products they have purchased but not reviewed, and easily write reviews for all unreviewed products. While there was currently a location for users to view all of the reviews they have written for products, there was no central location where users could view all of the products they had purchased and directly write reviews for those products.
Process
The post-purchase Order Center already had a page for users to see the reviews they have already written for products they have previously purchased. I created a space for the unreviewed products to be viewed there, prioritized over the product reviews. By placing it in the already existing framework it would be easy to develop and work with the users existing knowledge of how to review products on the website.
The stakeholder wasn’t convinced with this solution, citing a competitor as a system to replicate. I pushed back, asking to take some time to do a user test on the competitor website in order to see how user friendly it actually was. While there was a sensitive timeline to complete this project, I argued that we should at least know where the points of improvement were for the design the stakeholders were advocating for. It was decided that we could spare the time to do a test to make sure we were spending resources on the correct design. However, then it was a question of what to test. Due to privacy best practices we decided against asking users on usertesting.com to log into their account on the competitors website and review real products. Instead, I created two low fidelity prototypes - one with the original system that I had proposed, and one that more closely followed the competitor's system for reviewing products. They can be interacted with here (http://fin5bw.axshare.com). The flow for the test can also be found in the same document, as well as proof of concept mobile designs I created at a later date.
The test yielded that neither design was completely better than the other. If anything, the prototype that I proposed was less confusing to users. Some of the test subjects did not understand that the star rating of the competitor design would trigger the review module. After viewing the results of this test, as well as understanding how the proposed design would fit well into the current order center ecosystem, the stakeholder decided to move forward with the proposed design.
The Design
Within the pre-existing page where users can view the products they have already reviewed, as well as any 3rd party sellers they have already reviewed, I added an extra module for products purchased but not yet reviewed. This way users could review products, and then instantly see said review among their product reviews.
When the user clicks on the “Review” button a module to create the review pops up, so that the member never leaves the experience to create a review. After they submit a review they receive a confirmation alert underneath the product to show that they completed a review. That product will stay in the unreviewed module until a page refresh.
The mobile version has links to review the product instead of buttons, aligned with the Sears standards. The link opens a panel with the form inside.
End Result
The design was launched later that year.