Ratings and Reviews

Ratings and Reviews is a project that I worked on at Walmart for our Walmart Mexico website. Ratings and Reviews is introduced for the first time for our Walmart Mexico website. We partnered with third party user-generated content organizer — Bazaarvoice to render the review’s in the website.

Problem

Our customers are not able to take confident decision to add items to cart. This is very evident for certain products and categories that the customer are not familiar with or purchasing it for the first time. This results in abandoned orders.

Business case

• As per Reevo, there is 18% sales uplift for fully functional Review system.
• With 20% assumption, after year 1, assumed uplift will be 3.6%.
• 3.6% leads to a yearly Gross merchandise value (GMV) increase by 425 Million Pesos.

Inception

Our vision was to empower our customers to take confident decision while shopping online and share their opinions and experiences about a product with their fellow customers.

Challenges

• This project was completely new and was done for the first time by Walmart in Mexico market.
• Using a third party content organizer — Bazaarvoice to render the Ratings & Reviews and working with a fixed set of capabilities.
• Integrating Ratings and Reviews without breaking the previously established user flows.
• Encourage users to give their ratings and write their reviews.

My Role

• Product designer
• Interaction design
• User experience design
• End to end journey maping
• Research

Research

Bazaarvoice was already being used by Walmart websites in our other markets like in the UK — ASDA and George.com and in our Canada Walmart website. I studied these websites and worked closely with our developers to understand the behavior of Bazaarvoice.

For this project we chose competitive analysis as our primary research. I worked closely with our researcher to conduct our analysis and draw insights. Some of the key takeaways from the analysis are :

• Stars and numbers next to them are universally accepted and used to represent ratings.
• A quick consumable summary of the ratings and reviews of the product is required.
• Feature to filter out only positive or only negative reviews is required.
• Need to pro-actively request our customers to rate the product post purchase.

Secondary Research

For secondary research, I refereed to Baymard.com for user research study and article on Ratings and Reviews. Some of the key takeaways are :

• People rely on Ratings and Reviews to gauge a product’s value or quality.
• Users rely heavily on the number of user reviews when evaluating product ratings.
• Users would pick the product with the higher number of people ratings despite its lower average.
• Always display the number of ratings and reviews.

Ideation

Since we were integrating Ratings and Reviews into our existing website I started the ideation by studying the current website. This helped me to understand the existing user flows and finding out the touch points where our customers will be interacting with Ratings and Reviews.

The study helped me to identify different touch points with different levels of user interactions.

• In the Homepage and Product listing page (PLP) the customer can only view the Ratings.
• In the Product detail page (PDP) the customers can view Ratings and Reviews, interact with them and also submit Ratings and Reviews of their own.
• In the order history page the user can view the ratings and also can submit their Ratings and Reviews.

Based on all the learning’s I could decide on the feature and some of the key features are:

• Display Ratings summary on all item listing cards.
• Display Ratings and Reviews details on Product detail page (PDP).
• Users can review products and provide ratings on PDP.
• Users can review products and provide ratings from Order History page.
• Send emails to customers to review the product post purchase.
• Ability to write review in a separate page using links sent to emails.
• Ability to filter out positive and negative reviews.

Wireframes

I worked on the wireframes for both website and mweb. Using the wireframes we could finalize the flow, content and interactions. I used the wireframes to discuss about the features and interactions with the developers. This helped us to iterate and fine-tune them as we were using a third party content organizer and had to work with some technical constraints.

Final design

Closing thoughts

This project was a very good learning experience as we were introducing a new feature and incorporating it within an existing website used by millions of users in Mexico. I also got the chance to work with a third party technology and solve problems within the constraints.

Some enhancement opportunities in the next phase of the projects are :

• Introduce Ratings and Review for mobile app.
• Add product and review comparison feature.
• Make changes if needed from the learning’s of the first version.