Best Buy Customer Reviews
Improving the way customers find the right product
Overview
I led an end-to-end project to enhance the overall customer reviews experience to increase confidence in purchases and decrease return rates. For this project, I leveraged competitive analysis, past research studies and partnered with the design systems team to expand the toolset available to them when reviewing customer reviews. This redesign and additional features including filtering by star ratings, keywords, and viewing customer images, led to an improved overall engagement time, increased conversion, and decreased return rates, with improved confidence in the products they were purchasing.
My Role
UX Designer
Background
Best Buy is a technology retailer with an in-store and online presence. Most products sold are big ticket items and infrequent, so product research plays a significant role in the customer’s shopping journey. Customers are intent on wanting to purchase the right item for them and will spend most of their shopping journey on the research phase to ensure they are making the correct purchase.
Goal & Problems
Enhance the overall customer reviews experience to increase confidence in their purchases and decrease return rates.
Customer problems
Lacked confidence on choosing the right product deterring purchases
Primary reason for product returns due to mismatch in customer expectations
Business problems
12-15% overall return rates
Low engagement time (~15%) on customer reviews compared to market average of ~20-30%
Research findings
To better understand how users leveraged customer reviews, I collaborated with the research team to gain insights into the how and why behind their usage. Additionally, I conducted a competitive analysis to familiarize myself with the current industry standards for customer review experiences. This combined research enabled me to identify these key areas:
1. Why user-generated content
Unbiased opinions equaled authenticity
Likes/dislikes easy to identify
Broke down technical terms
2. Functional needs
Filter by stars and keywords
Image gallery
Sort options
Ideation & Partnerships
Based on these findings, I began concept designs for the visual hierarchy of the information and ideating on the new features for the customer reviews. During this time, I collaborated with design systems team and engineers to receive feedback and create a seamless experience that integrated with the rest of the Best Buy experience.
Design system components
New filter by stars and keywords
New image gallery
Identifying technical limitations
Custom keyword search unavailable
Data missing for associated review images
Final designs
Customer reviews on Product pages
Quickly gauge overall sentiment with reviews in the product title header
Preview customer reviews in context of manufacturer provided details
Truncated reviews and associated titles give a preview, where as the customer can expand for more details if interested
Filter by stars and keywords
Star breakdown provides a visual scale of the overall customer reviews sentiment and is tappable to allow for easy filtering
Keywords are tagged as pros/cons to help customers easily discover reviews on topics of interest and discover new points of interest
Customer images
Images are now available to customers and can be viewed in a gallery or per customer review
Thumbnail images provide a quick scan of the content, while enlarged images provide additional detail to the customer to support their research
Outcomes & Impact
Redesign won A/B test over a 3 month period
Increase engagement time with customer reviews from 15% - 23%
~3% increase in conversation rate
~2% decrease in return rate
Reflection
Focus on high impact changes
Early in the project I was asked to increase the scope to include Q&A user generated content as well within the expected timeline. It was helpful to have the research and data to present to PM that supported improvement on customer reviews would yield higher benefits to the customer and business to refocus the project and allow for Q&A to be a future project.
Collaboration early for fewer surprises
Working with the engineers during the ideating stage allowed for us to uncover some technical limitations and challenges that helped to inform the designs. We were able to design for modified experiences that still achieved its purpose within the given the project timeline thanks to collaborating early.
Would rerun the A/B test on a per feature basis
I believe it would have been helpful to see, at an incremental level, what design improvements and features were moving the metrics and creating the biggest change in experience for the customers. As well as giving a better understanding on an individual feature basis, if it was a positive or negative improvement to the experience and how to improve it.