Educents Reviews System Redesign
Educents is a ventured-backed marketplace to help homeschool parents discover educational resources provided by a community of independent sellers and small businesses. My role as a product designer was to revamp the reviews functionality throughout the platform as our primary focus of being a trusted marketplace with a community of parents.
Spring 2018
In Collaboration with Product Manager,
Product Design, User Research
Time: 1 Month
Problem
Overview
The ratio of customers who leave review on our platform after purchase is 1%, when a healthy ratio for other e-commerce platforms is 5-10%. This affects overall trust on our platform especially within our homeschool / active parent audience — most parents like reading or purchasing recommended products from other parents (based on our user interviews).
Goals
Our goal for this project was to see an increase in customers leaving reviews
- Increasing user generated reviews, which is considered unique content, healthy for organic growth
- Indirect Goal: increase in brand loyalty, trust, and acquisition
- Increase in brand metrics:
◔ Interaction (consideration, product reviews)
◔ Perceptual (positive associations, purchase intent),
◔ Performance (customer retention, revenue uplift, conversion rate)
Research
Market Research
Displaying Reviews from other parents giving them confidence before purchase
• According to Adweek, 46% of millennial moms use product reviews to purchase
• 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. (iPerceptions, 2011).
• Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (12x) over descriptions that come from manufacturers (eMarketer, February 2010).
• Reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales (According to Reevoo, re)
User Interviews (Feedback)
Many of our customers expressed hesitance before buying products on our platform. They described most of our reviews seemed "fake" because they were short and concise. Most of them were unaware they could leave a review on their recent purchases either because they haven't received any e-mail requesting them, or the functionality was no where to be found on our platform, including their account portal.
Findings
• The current UI of our reviews section at the bottom of the product page was very minimal. Many of our users found this section untrustworthy.
• The user would have to click 6 different pages in order to leave a review on our platform
• Our e-mails were only sent out to half of our customers who purchased
There were multiple ways to tackle this issue in a hollistic approach, not only focusing on one section of the platform, but from multiple angles and interactions.
• Redesigning reviews section on product pages, making it more legitimate, similar to other e-commerce platforms, and more engaging through ui or copy
• Showcase recent reviews on the top of the product page, underneath the product summary
• Fixing overall usability: make it easier for users to leave reviews from the account page & through email
• Making sure our e-mail drip campaign goes through every time a user makes a purchase
• Giving a brand personality to our review system and adding "kid reactions", a feature that gives the parent an option to choose whether their kids "loved the product", "found it cool", or "found it boring.
Ideations
After 3 months, our review usage with descriptions increased to 5%, while conversion rates went up by 8%.
If the number of reviews by users did not increase, our second hypothesis is out of product control: customer service. Perhaps the user has overall bad user experience or slow shipment with their orders, which causes them not to leave a review.
The product team will work with devs to send out 3 emails to the user asking to rate the items from their orders. We will follow the same layout / user flow as amazon and possibly give an incentive (chance to win $100 — although a very old model)
If all else does not improve, perhaps we do not receive enough orders to increase our purchases/review ratio, learned parents do not like writing product reviews (maybe they’re too busy), or overall bad user experience with sellers, customer service, and shipment.