My Reviews

How do we motivate travelers to leave more reviews?

Background

Reviews are one of the most important factors for a traveler deciding on a hotel. They help travelers compare options and feel confident in their choice, and as a result, properties with more reviews get more business.

Our competitors were making huge strides in motivating their users to leave more reviews — this was a clear customer and business gap we needed to address.

User Problem

In user interviews, frequent reviewers told us they wanted to be able to see all of their reviews in one place and know they were helping other travelers.

Goals

Create an experience that encourages travelers to leave reviews
Build a page where travelers can see all of their reviews

My Role

As the lead designer, I was responsible for two workstreams:

I created a feedback loop, building a design strategy that spanned multiple product teams
I designed and executed a brand new “My Reviews page”, working closely with the User Generated Content (UGC) product team who would build the experience

Though I was the sole UX person on this project, I leaned on my content strategy team mates for advice & feedback.

Process

1. Framing the problem

An audit revealed that the current flow didn’t give customers any positive feedback about their review. Once a review was submitted, there was no further contact — the conversation abruptly stopped without any further opportunities for engagement.

This led to the question:
What needs to be in place to help make our reviewers feel good and motivate them to contribute more?

2. Creating a positive feedback loop

In my competitor audit, one clear pattern emerged — all of our competitors had a feedback loop that let reviewers know how they were helping other people. Most importantly, competitors had a unique page where users could view all of their reviews.

Competitor feedback loops used the same four elements: a helpfulness indicator, a page where travelers can see their contributions, a positive feedback summary, and helpfulness playback on individual reviews

How Expedia might use those elements to create a motivational feedback loop

3. Designing My Reviews

First, I documented all of the jobs the reviews page would need to do, then created users scenarios & wireframes to uncover gaps.

Next, I did a number of visual explorations; getting feedback from product, engineering, and UX team members.

4. Design hand off

There was a 4 month gap between finalizing the designs and when the developers were able to begin work. During that time a few things changed; UX had fully migrated to a new design system and the UGC product team lost some front-end development talent. The team was still committed to getting this experience launched but scope needed to be scaled back to an MVP. We worked together to identify the core experience we could build, which required a quick redesign with the new design system components, then we built it within a few weeks and the experience went live!

Pages were simplified and redesigned with the new design system

Project hand off

I pulled together a strategy for creating a reviews ecosystem that supported motivational feedback loops. By presenting to relevant product teams, I was able to get cross-organizational support and commitment to building out the other components. The team that owned review display on the product page took on the feedback indicator components, and the newly created Profiles team took over future iterations of the My Reviews page. The next step will be to integrate My Reviews into a new member profile experience.