Rating & Reviews
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Company
Myntra is an online shopping site for fashion & lifestyle, catering to 22M monthly users across India
Role
Lead UX designer
In collaboration with
Product Manager, Category Manager, Beauty Experts, Engineering team
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Introduction
We have debated about having Ratings and Reviews on Myntra for quite a while now. The traditional business of fashion apparel is low-depth, because of which in most cases a style would sell out before it gathers any meaningful amount of ratings and reviews.
However, with the introduction of high-depth categories like beauty and personal care where the same SKU is likely to sell in the system for years, these categories have a need for user-generated ratings and reviews.
With honest pricing, similar buying and ordering experiences, the lack of ratings and reviews is a competitive gap with other players in the
e-commerce space.
Goal — Allow customers to rate and review products they bought on Myntra
Our guiding principals
Focus on Quality
Optimize for quality and use category-specific dimensions to guide the customer while rating a product.
For e.g. while rating a lipstick, we want to ask the customer to rate the product on color, longevity, finish, and pigmentation along with overall rating. This guidance should get us more accurate and relevant ratings.
Product rating should not be affected by operational factors
Delivery-related feedback should not have a bearing on the product rating.
Types of rating scales
5-point scale
This is similar to the overall product rating: a customer enters a value between 1 and 5 for attributes that range from good to bad. e.g. value for money, color, etc.
There are different numeric scales present in the market ranging from 3- point to 10-point and each one can be used for different use-cases. We did some research and after understanding each one of them we were more confident to go ahead with a 5-point scale for collecting product ratings. It also aligned with the common behavior already set in the e-commerce space where users are providing product ratings on a 5-point scale.
Advantages for a 5-point scale
# It is relatively easier for users to understand
# It provides a neutral option along with 2 types of extremes
2- way scale
These ratings are product attributes that vary along with a range but the extremes do not necessarily represent good vs bad. E.g. rating a top on transparency from Sheer to Opaque. In these cases, we will gather inputs using a slider where the default position is in the middle so as to not bias the customers. Both ends will have some labels. Another example is the sizing rating which varies between ‘Too Tight’ and ‘Too Loose’. In this case, the extremes represent a bad outcome and the middle represents the optimum.
Final product rating logic
The final product rating will be a weighted-average of all user-ratings. Similarly, the final dimensional rating will be a weighted-average of all user-level dimensional ratings. The rating will be generated only when the number of users crosses a minimum threshold.
When is a good time to ask a customer to rate a product?
We thought about when to ask for a product rating from a user after the product is received. We wanted to give enough time to our users to ensure they try the product. To start with, we decided to wait for 4–5 days post order delivery.
Collection of product rating from different touch-points in the app, website, email & notifications
After finalizing the scope, logic, and scale of ratings, we began to iterate on the design flow. As said earlier, we wanted to explore multiple ways/touch-points from where a user could rate a product to ensure maximum collection.
In the first phase launch, we focused on ratings and reviews with a 5-point scale, and category-specific ratings were kept for the phase 2 release.
Post collection of ratings and reviews
When a user submits a rating, it is instantly saved and can be displayed to other users. But reviews need to be verified and monitored before they start showing up on the platform to ensure content and imagery sanity.
Below are the different scenarios for reviews that are communicated via email.
Display of user ratings and reviews on different touch-points
Once we collected substantial ratings, we started showing them to users on different touch-points like product page, filter, product listing, and more…
Rating and reviews were launched on Myntra across all platforms- Android, iOS, web, and mweb in 2018.
Testing & Quantitative results
The experience was launched behind an A/B test post the design completion. The below data shows the data point for the first 30 days of the test.
PDP to Cart% increased by 1.2%
Adds to Cart/User increased by 1%
Products with ratings and reviews feature had a higher conversion rate from PDP. After getting to a steady number, the feature was rolled out to 100% users.
Next steps
Work towards category-specific rating collection. This meant understanding each category in-depth and figuring out the attributes which move the needle for that category. We collaborated with category heads in Myntra to understand pain-points while buying specific categories like personal care, shoes, etc. We reached out to brands like MAC, Clinique and visited their stores to observe on-site customers and interacted with them. The scope was defined to deep dive into one category at a time and launch accordingly.
