UX Strategy for Review FormS

Background

Expedia’s User Generated Content (UGC) team built a new platform that gave the company the ability to create a dynamic, customizable review form. Following its launch, the UGC team was inundated by requests from product and content teams wanting to use the review form to collect new types of content.

The hotel review form was already performing poorly. By adding new questions without a strategy in place, we risked a further decline in submission rates and eroding our users’ trust in our brand.

Traveler impact

We knew from qualitative research that our hotel review form was too long and difficult to use. The new questions were often irrelevant, functionality was buggy, and users were left with the impression Expedia didn’t value their time.

Goals

Create a northstar hotel review form that uses dynamic platform capabilities to ask questions that are relevant to both the traveler and the property
Define a UX strategy for improving the quantity and quality of content we collect with dynamic review forms

My role

Sole designer responsible for all UX, visual design, & prototyping
Partnered with a content strategist to create a framework for dynamic collection
Championed customer-centricity for global product and engineering teams to help drive product roadmaps and prioritize building the new experience

Process

1. Identify the problem areas

The new platform added a lot of variables to our form. As a first step, we did an extensive audit of our existing forms and mapped it against our competitors’ forms. This allowed us to establish a baseline for understanding issues with the current form.

Device data showed us where users were abandoning the form, and we were able to quickly identify the questions and formatting that created the most friction.

We took the findings from our internal audit and combined them with competitor themes, which helped us establish three main problem areas to tackle.

Hygiene (basic usability)
Relevancy
Platform efficiency

2. Ideation & exploration

With these areas in mind, we began exploring ways to ask the right question at the right time, and in the right way. We started by grouping the questions by trip experience which helped create a more cohesive conversation. Then we prioritized those questions based on research insights into what our customers want to know. New questions could be categorized similarly.

Thinking of the form as a conversation helped us identify natural pauses where it was appropriate to switch context and ask about different experiences. We called these “interstitials”.

Grouping questions by trip experience helped us create a form that felt more conversational

Interstitials allowed us to collect the content that was most important, while still leaving a path for users to share more about their trip if they wanted to

3. Get stakeholder support

We’d been communicating our progress throughout the project, but it was time to get all the stakeholders on board with our vision.

I visited our global product and dev teams in India and gave a presentation illustrating the problems with the current form, then used a prototype of our northstar to get the internal content teams excited about the new design strategy.

4. Hand off designs and UX roadmap

Once the form work prioritized, I began building out final specs. Because of the number of variables the dynamic platform introduced, instead of handing off a single MVP I compiled a list of test ideas with accompanying design specs which we prioritized based on impact, opportunity costs, and dependancies.

As of early 2020, we’re actively building and testing our way through that list.