Addressing Abandonment with the Product Review Form

Problem

50.1% of customers do not complete the form to submit a product review, leading to $12-36 million in unrealized revenue and cost savings

Strategy

identify and remove perceived barriers to completing the product review form quickly and easily

Timeline

10 weeks to design handoff
August to mid-October 2024

Team

myself and Karlie (manager)
Erinn and Jeff (product), Trang (engineering), design, engineering, and research partners

Results

5% reduction in form abandonment while also improving review quality

Discover

With the importance of product reviews in the shopping journey of potential customers, Best Buy knew more was needed to address the increasing abandonment rate of the form.

To complicate the issue, products with fewer than 30 reviews were not experiencing a benefit from having reviews at all, creating a steep slope for new products to overcome.

Action had to be taken to not only make it easier to submit reviews, but for it to appear and feel simpler to complete the process, too.

Existing Conditions

The web version of the product review form was a single page, but cluttered by text in the header and a section—Help Us Break it Down—that wasn’t providing value to customers any longer.

The app version used a stepwise approach without a progress indicator, likely contributing to elevated abandonment compared to the web version.

Competitive Analysis

Looking at some of Best Buy’s competitors—Amazon, Lowe’s, and Target—uncovered similar issues and some potential solutions.

Amazon’s form was noticeably simpler and cleaner.

Lowe’s form used a side sheet to meet users where they were at in their journey.

None of them used a stepwise approach like Best Buy’s app was using.

Research: Baymard Institute

Reviewing industry best practices for review forms identified some areas of opportunity.

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Define

Project Goals

Provide instructional content for guidance.

Reduce content and the number of questions.

Highlight incentivization in a more affective way.

How might we make it look and feel easier for customers to provide feedback on products?

Develop

First Steps

With an appreciation for Lowe’s approach, the decision was made to help keep users in place by using a side sheet for the form.

The underused Help Us Break it Down section was also removed to reduce the number of questions on the form.

Instructional text and sample text to make it easier for users to answer questions was added to fields.

Design Crit

Early feedback from the design team suggested that additional negative space around questions was needed since the content felt very dense.

The suggestion of using a full-width side sheet was also made with the purpose of providing a bit more space.

Research: Best Buy

A usability study comparing the proposed form to the existing one showed that progress was being made.

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Design Crit

Additional design team feedback following the usability study sparked two ideas that would help simplify the form.

First, designing an interaction that would hide instructional text when the associated field was not active, but revealing it when a user clicked into a field.

Also, using accordions to consolidate optional questions would help reduce cognitive load.

The Shake-Up

Late in the design phase, feedback from the Engineering team indicated that the side sheet component would not be available in time for this project. Further, shifting from a full page to a sheet would add complexity when trying to link to the review form directly.

With this feedback, the design reverted to a full page without affecting the layout of the form.

With the importance of the incentivization messaging being every-present, an additional banner was added above the accordion for customers to upload product images.