Review
The Design Need:
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.
Design Examples:
Design Solution:
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:
- target elements: display information about the subject of the review;
- review elements: display the user’s (in this case the author’s) input about the ‘target’;
- form elements: providing a clear CTA which enables readers of the review to perform a next step (writing a comment or their own review) or respond (by allowing users to vote on how helpful a review is or report abuse).
The review form usually includes the following five fundamentals:
- the users identity, which can be pre-populated if the user is already signed in or else can be requested via a field that is required since anonymous reviews have mostly less value. If the site works with user profiles, the user name must provide a link to this page on which you can find all reviews written by this person next to some user details.
- the rating (if offered) which is quantitative;
- a field to enter the (actual) review which is the user’s qualitative assessment of the object;
- guidelines for helping the user writing this review (can be in the form of a tooltip or a separate guideline section); and
- any legal disclaimers (mostly linked to the guidelines);
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
- If a user submits the review without errors they should get a confirmation message of this action. You can provide additional CTA’s related to this first action if relevant in this message. When this review isn’t directly published, share information when this will be to set the right expectations with the user. Provide in any case a clear way back to the review’s start point. If the user has not filled out the required fields or made some errors, provide clear error messages.
- When a user previews the review, display how it will appear when published and then allow the user to either edit or submit this review.
- If he cancels it, return them to the review’s initiation point.
Make it possible to sort (e.g. based on thumbs up and or rating) and/or filter reviews to enable quick scanning.
When to use:
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.
Why use this solution (rationale):
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.
More info elsewhere:
- “Architecture of a review” on developer.yahoo.com
- “Write a review” on developer.yahoo.com
- “How to engage customers in your E-commerce Website”, by R. Andras. in Smashing Magazine
- “Designing for the Social Web.” book by J. Porter (2008), New Riders.
- “The magic behind Amazon’s 2,7 billion dollar question.” on uie.com
