You’re scrolling through the Amazon app, and a product catches your eye. It’s reasonably priced and has a good rating with many reviews.
As you read through the product description, you are excited to see that it has everything you’re looking for, but before you add it to your cart you want to see what other buyers are saying about the product.
You scroll through a few reviews that all rave about the product — that’s nothing new.
So, you decide to filter by 1-star reviews, but find yourself repeatedly reading through all the product’s poor qualities.
Suddenly those majority of reviews praising the product don’t matter anymore, and you decide its not worth the risk of purchasing.
This scenario is something that I have noticed happening to me and my peers whenever we use Amazon, and it often needlessly prolonged the process of online shopping as we spent time reading the reviews only to reject product after product. It led me to one question:
How could I reduce the amount of time spent trying to decide if a product was worth buying?
Understanding How Customers Choose Products
Before coming up with solutions, I needed to understand what information customers were looking for before deciding whether or not to buy a product.
I asked some of the app’s users to explain the thought process they go through when choosing items, and what information they seek out and prioritize.
My key findings from the interviews were:
- Users are attracted to a product by its price and rating, but use the description to confirm whether it fits their needs
- Users look at negative reviews more than positive reviews because they want to know what issues they might have with the product
- Users consider negative reviews more trustworthy because they are less likely to be paid or fake
- After reading the product description, most users don’t have a specific piece of information they are looking for, and just want know what negative characteristics the product might have
The Problem
Customers rely on the reviews to decide whether or not to buy a product. However, they often filter by the negative and 1-star reviews instead of looking at the reviews as a whole, which causes them to refrain from purchasing potentially good items because:
They are wary of fake and paid reviews, and find the negative reviews more trustworthy than the positive reviews.
The information in negative reviews better compliments the information they get from the description by confirming whether certain features work or if there are negative features not mentioned in the description.
The Solution: Reviews Summary
The final solution I designed was a section that summarizes trends in reviews, so that users can get an impression of what is in all of the reviews before filtering to specific reviews.
How I Got There
The Brainstorming Session
I worked in a group of three to brainstorm, and after aggregating dozens of notecards of ideas, we came up with 6 potential solutions to explore:
Making a Decision
After considering the feasibility and impact of each solution, I decided to narrow down my explorations to Solution 2, Solution 3, and Solution 6
I started drawing some low-fidelity sketches of what each solution might look like, and trying to see how they would fit in with the already established look and organization that Amazon app users are used to.
However, as I drew out the sketches, I realized that none of these solutions seemed to efficiently solve the initial problem of users immediately gravitating towards negative reviews.
(Re)Making a Decision
I was trying to reorganize reviews to help users find information more easily, but by just reordering reviews, there was still an issue of users simply filtering by star ratings again before looking at any reviews.
So, I decided to refer back to my brainstorming session and revisit one of our solution spaces: providing an information summary.
Specifically, I decided to summarize the reviews. Users will see a summary of the good and bad aspects of the product before viewing individual reviews.
By adding the review summary feature, I was hoping for two main outcomes:
- Adding an extra screen to navigate through would persuade users to first read the summary before moving on and filtering by star ratings.
- By looking at the summary, users will be able to get an overall picture of reviewers’ opinions before looking at specific reviews, and not have their perception of the product built entirely by the first few (and likely negative) reviews that they read.
Having a summary can also help categorize reviews; users can click on the different summary points that they find relevant and see what reviews have contributed to creating that summary point.
Exploring with Flows
While playing around with different variations of the reviews summary feature, my main goals were:
- Figuring out how to incorporate the content into the existing flow, so that the new feature did not seem to out of place to users
- Improving the ease of seeing reviews, as currently users have a long scroll past a lot of content before reaching them
Medium-Fidelity Flows
When conducting user testing, I experimented with a 3 different flows
- The first flow places the Reviews Summary where the reviews are currently located. From the summary page, users can navigate to reviews related to each of the like/dislike tags, or navigate to all of the reviews and filter through them as they normally would
2. The general flow remains the same, but the feature is now located almost directly after viewing the product, to reduce the amount of scrolling.
3. This flow includes the existing “By feature” section in the general reviews screen. I did not want to clutter the Reviews Summary Screen. I also worried that users might try clicking on the features as they do with the tags; moving the feature ratings to the end step might help eliminate this confusion.
User Testing Feedback
While testing these three flows, I received the following feedback:
- Users preferred the location of Flow 2, because they did not want to be distracting from looking at their current product with other options. However, having the product information and customer questions appear before the summary was preferred
- Users did not notice quickly when the “By feature” ratings were missing
- Some of my flows used colored tags to indicate that tag’s frequency. Users suggested putting the tags in order of frequency.
- Users wanted to see more than just one top positive and negative review in the summary.
- Users like seeing how many reviews a product has, since it lets them know how much weight each review carries.
Based on this feedback, I updated and decided on a flow that keeps users from scrolling too far, allows users to see a few of the top reviews by opening a modal screen from the first screen, and orders the tags in descending popularity.
The main tradeoff with this flow is that it does not include the rating distribution or the reviewer images on the main page.
While this might have allowed some users a faster way to get to the information they wanted, I worried that putting the distribution in the summaries section would add too much information to the page and cause users to ignore the rest of the summary.
Visual Design
With the flow decided on, I started working on the high-fidelity prototype.
Amazon already has an established look that I followed so that the Reviews Summary would not feel out of place in the app
I noticed that the app used some colors that were not mentioned in Amazon’s official brand guidelines, so I organized these colors under “Unofficial Brand”
Takeaway and Reflection
Given time constraints and restricted interactions with others, I was unable to get a large range of people to test the final prototype, but if I were to continue this project, it would be interesting to see how different users respond to the Reviews Summary. Would interactions be different for those who primarily use the app for books? For groceries?
This was my first case study, and I learned much about the design process, especially the importance of user research and user feedback, as the entirety of my project was based around what I had learned in my initial interviews.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to be able to get constant feedback and guidance as I worked through this project, and I look forward to continuing to learn and expand my experience in product design!
