My Role
Lead designer responsible for research, conceptualization, and design
The Team
Head of Global Digital Marketing
Global Art Director
Development team
Timeline
2 weeks
Introduction
In 2023 woom made an effort to improve site usability after merging the US and European sites into one localized site in 2022 This involved optimizing existing components for mobile, addressing inventory transparency, and implementing tools to facilitate informed purchasing ahead of the busiest shopping season.
Context
We know that peer reviews are integral to woom’s success as users have developed their own social groups where they can buy, sell, trade and seek advice from others whose children ride a woom or might in the future.
Reviews and advanced filtering provide users with soical proof and additional context to help them make decisions more efficiently.
By integrating a third party software, we were able to decrease time to launch with maximum impact, implementing familiar and easy-to-use features and a consistent native experience.
Results
Due to our limited timeline, this project is being rolled out in phases and has yet to include smart tags and advanced filtering. Reviews were rolled out during the holiday season and many shoppers were expected to review once their child began using the product in the new year.
By early 2024 users are utilizing new features, rating existing reviews and utilizing image uploads. While only 4% of all reviews have been written after the re-launch, we can see that users are engaging with these reviews more frequently and can be used as a variable in determining relevance. The woom 1 PLUS ORIGINAL has 19 reviews in total, but only 2 coming from 2024. Of the first 5 most recent results, users engaged with three reviews, including 71 users.
To confirm these results are accurate, we need to conduct more research, such as a system usability survey or desirability study that determines how influential consumers rate reviews in their purchasing decisions. We could also cluster themes to understand what factors helped customers most in making their purchasing decisions. Time on task would tell us how quickly users were able to locate relevant information.
Skip the small talk
Secondary Research
We relied heavily on secondary research from trusted industry experts to inform and define our value proposition later in the project.
Must Have:
Nielson Norman group explains that users generally expect and appreciate reviews on product pages which are sortable and filterable by rating.
Could Have:
If executed with high usability, users thought that photo or video reviews and advanced filtering were nice to have.
Primary Research
A competitive audit of 4 retailers was conducted to confirm industry standards expected by our users.
Our Users
By better understanding our users, we can start to understand how we can build a solution to best fit their needs.
User Traits
01. Busy
Parents are busy balancing care-taking needs while managing their own personal lives and do not have a wealth of time to spend online shopping.
02. Caring
Most of woom’s least technically affluent consumers fall into the “caring parent” segment and are looking to provide the best experiences for their children in terms of health and development. They are seeking well-vetted products and trustworthy, transparent retailers.
03. Informed
These customers want to make informed decisions and typically are introduced to the brand through word of mouth or their own research. They seek validation from their peers’ experiences in order to protect themselves from poor purchasing decisions.
Next, we broke down the problem to better understand how we can build reviews that benefit our users.
The Problem
Busy parents do not have an abundance of time to make purchasing decisions and need to efficiently determine the best size, model, and if products meets their needs.
Goals
01. Easy to Use
It should be accessible to all and use familiar navigation methods to complete.
02. Reliable
Context should validate success or failure of an action and build trust through open and continuous communication.
03. User Control
Flexible processes should allow users to decide how they want the product to work.
Our value proposition was determined by referring to our initial research while keeping our users needs in mind.
Must Have
Should Have
The Solution
The final solution built upon our previous experience adding advanced filtering, verification, and photo reviews added for a more informative and efficient user experience.
Easy to Use
Industry Standards & Familiar Navigation
Many of our users are informed purchasers seeking to confirm their own research or referrals from peers. They need to easily locate transparent positive and negative reviews with familiar sorting and filtering.
Interactive Rating Snapshot summaries allow users to quickly and easily navigate to the most negative reviews to confirm relevance. Reviews can be sorted by most recent, highest rating, reviews with photos, featured reviews, and most helpful.
Since most users snap photos on mobile phones, detail views of reviews with photos prioritize vertical orientations ensuring the entire image can be viewed.
Third party software integration adds nice-to-have features while maintaining a native experience that is consistent with the rest of our website.
Easy to Use
Improving Scannability
Our users are busy parents who need to efficiently locate relevant information. Informative summaries improve scannability by communicating recommendation percentage, overall rating, and rating snapshot.
User context and important information are located at the top of each review to quickly summarize and confirm relevance.
Since our customers often write lengthy reviews, 5 results are loaded per page on product detail pages, organizing information into digestible chunks.
Reliable
Building Trust
Parents are seeking vetted products from trustworthy retailers in order to provide the best experiences for their children. Verifications build trust with our users, ensuring content is accurate and reflective of real experiences, while recommendation status confirms that expectations are met.
Users can vote for helpful reviews and infer social proof from what other customers are considering while making their own purchasing decisions.
Confirmation messages build trust by providing visibility of system status and continuous and open communication.
Reliable
Contextual Reviews
Reviews are intended to provide additional insight and answer questions that might not be provided in product descriptions. By completing a short survey, reviewers provide important user context like rider age, skill level, and even locality.
Users can add visual context by uploading photos that convey product use, child’s size and even confirming assumptions about product quality.
Because our site is localized and the review feature is new to certain regions, some markets may lack local reviews. Communicating locality allows us to extend context to markets in the early stages of review collection without syndicating from dealers.
Names of products being reviewed convey relevance of reviews located outside of product detail pages and provide system visibility.
User Control
Flexible Processes
It was important to provide flexible processes that fit the needs of both new and experienced, returning users.
Advanced filtering adds contextual relevance unique to our product like age and skill level while smart tags determined by review content allows users to filter based on popular topics.
Paginated navigation provides user control and allow users to freely navigate based on their needs without frustration.
Hyperlinked star ratings accelerate processes for experienced users from product descriptions and overview pages and provide social proof for new users.
