Reviews

Helping guests understand ratings and reviews and updating an outdated review collection system.

REVIEWING THE PROBLEM

Hotel reviews often lacked relevance, clarity, and trustworthiness, leaving users uncertain about booking decisions. Addressing these issues required strategic content design to boost user confidence and improve conversion rates.

As the lead designer, I spearheaded this initiative, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver a scalable and user-centric solution. My responsibilities included defining the design strategy, driving team alignment, and presenting results to stakeholders.

To address this, I led focus group sessions in North America focusing on:

Influence on hotel choices
Trust in reviews
Rating system comprehension
Motivations for submitting property reviews

MOTIVATIONS & COLLECTION

To increase review submissions (and overall conversion), we focused on email as an effective channel, testing five subject lines targeting different psychological motivations.

Emotional involvement: Love it? Hate it? Tell us how you felt about Hilton Amsterdam.
Self-enhancement: Other travellers want to know what you thought about Hilton Amsterdam.
Altruism: Help other travellers learn about Hilton Amsterdam.
Community: Join the discussion, tell other travellers what you thought about Hilton Amsterdam.
Ease: Rate Hilton Amsterdam

The results showed that guests were deterred by perceived effort. As much as I enjoy writing more involved content, I've found simple and concise content usually resonates the most with users in a UX flow.

Emphasising ease of use in the subject line increased submissions by 15%, which resulted in a 3% increase in conversion. After analysing our data, I modified review forms to inquire about key topics, improving review content and increasing user confidence in their accommodation choices.

UNDERSTAND & DISPLAY

To enhance trust in reviews, I added elements to the display based on user feedback from our focus groups: traveller type, country of residence, and profile image.

This customisation improved relevance and reassured users when considering booking. The resulting increased trust users had in our reviews resulted in a significant increase in conversion.

After discussions with our localisation department, I realised how different cultures and parts of the world view hotel ratings. I saw an opportunity to make our review scores more accurate. I did this by:

Data mining review content based on country and language to see which common words and phrases were being used to describe properties in each guest score range
Adapting review adjectives guests could select when leaving a review, working with our localisation department and results from A/B experimentation in order to make them more accurate for our user's language, country, and culture.
Updating both the guest-facing and partner-facing review scores
Developing a new metric to measure accuracy and perceived trust in the Booking.com platform - essentially measuring whether a guest's expectations were met after staying at a property
Analysed and adjusted rating system to align with users' intentions, further boosting trust and conversion.