Let’s Get Personal: Online Shoppers Seek Feedback
It’s interesting that as we move to an online marketplace, viewed by some as being “less personal,” that we should come to depend more on the opinions and regard of other people. Although while shopping in a physical store location, you may never find yourself turning to the stranger next to you and asking their opinion of a product, your experience with an online shopping site may be completely different. This means that that the “feedback” or “reviews” section of any website has become increasingly important as individuals seek to gain affirmation for their purchases and decisions.
In usability tests, users have indicated that the Feedback portion of a site is extremely important in influencing their purchase of a product. With this in mind, providing customer feedback on a product in an easy-to-sort manner, with the ability to narrow and filter reviews, enables site visitors to make informed decisions regarding their purchases. In considering how users may prefer to sort through feedback, think of what aspects of a review would be helpful in affecting their decisions: recency of data, helpfulness of review, ratings, and the most important, positive and negative comments. Allowing users to easily filter and sort through reviews can have a tremendous impact on their perception of not only the product in question, but also your website in general.
In the example below, the site gives information on how much positive and negative feedback has been given, but does not provide an easy way to get directly to the negative comments. Instead you have to sort through 26,249 comments on 1050 pages to see if any of the negative comments are something you should be concerned about. While the icons may look clickable since they are in another text color, they are actually not.
Another item missing from the above example, in addition to not being able to sort by positive or negative opinions, is the ability to see what other feedback the reviewer may have given. (In the case above, clicking on the buyer’s name will only bring back reviews given regarding the buyer). Seeing what other items a reviewer has assessed is useful for a number of reasons. For one, depending on the type of product the user is reviewing, it helps the potential buyer get an understanding of the similarity of the person’s tastes and judgments compared to theirs.
Consider the following example:
The user who reads such a positive review on this item may be curious to see what other items the reviewer has evaluated to see if their interests are aligned (in this case, recipes). This may then influence the buyer’s predisposition towards the review’s favorability. Another reason for having a ‘More reviews by???’ functionality is that it aids in directing users to other items that someone with their tastes have purchased or recommended. This is a good way to indirectly suggest other products and encourage more purchases. Another useful functionality included in the above example, and also in the one below, is the ability to sort by and view which reviews have been most helpful to users.
This is important for the serious buyer, who may not want to have to manually filter through superfluous reviews that don’t give a lot of insight into the product (such as, “this product is great!”) when seeking more detailed feedback.
Of course having a ‘Most Helpful’ sort feature requires that visitors are able to indicate whether a particular review was helpful. In the example above, visitors click either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and assist in determining the usefulness of this review. Users can sort by ‘Most Helpful’ to gather more detailed accounts of the product they are considering. Additionally, having the ‘thumbs-up’ symbol serves a similar purpose as the 4 or 5 star rating system and allows users to ascertain at a glance whether the review will be positive or negative.
In the following example, an online book-selling site has not only provided several ways for the user to sort and narrow customer reviews, but has also allowed the user to directly enter in a word or phrase to search with. In this case, entering in the words “boring” or “scary” might return a review on a children’s book that gives the exact information that the user was attempting to learn.
Another useful feature offered by this site is that users can narrow the results to just see certain ratings, such as ‘5-Star Reviews Only’ or ‘1-Star Reviews Only.’ This allows users to expediently find out opinions of the best and the worst of the product. Implementing an effective ‘Sort-by’ feature simplifies the ability for users to review products, thus making the browsing/shopping experience more enjoyable and enabling users to explore other products on their own terms. The importance of including others’ feedback in an increasingly online market helps to ensure that customers make informed and satisfying purchases.
Ircka West - Usability Analyst Double-byte Language Support
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