A review contains a critical evaluation of an object (place, person or thing) on the basis of a users’ personal taste. Users want to share their opinion about something. By writing a review they can argument why their experience is positive or negative which provides much more detail then a rating only.
A product or website needs to present reviews (and ratings) in a structured way by grouping related elements. This should enable a user to scan the content (quickly) without being confused, but also the process of adding a review should be as easy as possible to get people motivated to start contributing in the first way. The architecture of a review can be broken down into three types of elements:
The review form usually includes the following five fundamentals:
Other elements that are often part of a review are a title created by the author (this is mostly optional), the date of submission, and discloser options (to show/hide the remaining comments when they are restricted to display a certain amount of characters). It is important, just like for every other form, to present not more fields then necessary and to indicate which fields are required clearly. Allow the user to move from one field to the next one by pressing the Tab key to make the form accessible for everybody. Also utilize minimum and maximum character restrictions on the different fields to encourage the appropriate field length if needed. Also the order in which you present the fields towards the users is important. Rather than presenting them how the review will appear when published, they need to be shown towards the user in such way that they are most conductive to complete. In some cases it can be wise to allow pros and cons in addition to or in place of a full review. After the user has completed his review, you should allow him the option of submitting (which should always be the primary CTA if there is more then one action that can also be ‘activated’ with the enter key), previewing, or canceling it
Make it possible to sort (e.g. based on thumbs up and or rating) and/or filter reviews to enable quick scanning.
When you want to show trustworthy information provided by real people of a certain product or website you can allow people to share their opinion about this object. A user can show if he evaluates the object positive or negative by giving it a rating. When you combine this rating with a review you obtain even richer feedback about this object which can generate conversions i case a certain object is evaluated as being positive which can increase sale.
There are different types of reviews. The first type is written by the consumer himself who wants to share his positive or negative experiences of with a certain object which they own or use(d). Then you have expert reviews, who have mostly tested several comparable peer products or services and can give advice which offers the best value or has the best features. Finally there are bought reviews, mostly used for new products, which can be biased since their is a (financial) relationship between the ‘owner’ of the reviewed item and the reviewer. In that case it is better to share this relationship with the audience.