Thumbs
Thumbs is a web extension that lets you upvote or downvote a product you bought on amazon, to make reviewing a product easier and build a more informed shopping culture online.
Introduction
Do you spend hours on the amazon website reading reviews before you buy a product? So do we.
But how often do you review a product you bought online? Almost never.
Despite the role of reviews in the buying process, most e-commerce websites find it difficult to get people to review. We discovered that the problem lies in the review process. To review a product, you have to first open the website, give ratings out of five stars and then drop a comment about your experience. In an urban city, a human being does on average 50 tasks a day and the average human attention span is only 12 seconds. We created Thumbs to bridge this gap. Thumbs lets you upvote or downvote a product you bought on amazon quickly.
Research and Validation
To validate the existence of this issue, we found that only 20% of customers who bought a product on amazon actually reviewed it. In most cases, the customers only review a product when they face extreme satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a product. We then interviewed people with different levels of exposure to the e-commerce website. More than 80% of people confirmed the problem lies in the long reviewing process.
The scope of the problem lies across all e-commerce websites. We chose to dig deeper in the amazon reviewing process. Out of the people who review, the pattern
Vision of Thumbs
Thumbs aims at solving two issues:
- Long process of reviewing products bought online.
- Painful process of reading comments to understand if a product is worthy.
Evolution of Thumbs
First Look
The team started with the idea of creating a web page where the users can search a product to look up reviews for a product on amazon. The users could then see a list of products accompanied by reviews and a link to the product on amazon web page. Drawbacks of the product design was that it defeated the idea of reducing the number of steps in the review process. We circled back to find what the solution should be.
Final Look
The product was then transformed from a webpage to a web-extension. This web-extension would embed a widget on the amazon web-page next to the product. The first phase designs of the widget looked something like the images below.
Solution
After you download and install the web-extension:
- You can find a thumbs plugin icon on his browser and a tab next to the product on the e-commerce website. The tab shows a holistic review of the product and also displays a login feature.
- The plugin on the top of the browser lets you logout of Thumbs.
When you buy a product online, remember that reviewing is easy with Thumbs.
You can find a thumbs plugin icon on the browser and a tab next to the product on the e-commerce website. The tab only shows him the existing reviews of the product until you login. After login, you can review the product by quick upvote or downvote.
High-Five Designs
Learnings
Product Manager Learnings:
Shivani
Designer Learnings:
Rob
Developer Learnings:
Anna
Developers Learnings:
Mohammed
&
Full Team Learning
Lesson 1: Without experimentation, there is no innovation.
Planning is a crucial part of the mobile development process. Great features, on the other hand, don't always follow a careful design. They can also evolve as a result of experimentation, in which developers and designers try out numerous thoughts and ideas to see what works best for the clients. We spent a lot of time constructing the website only to discover that it didn't solve our problem. The team discussed other options for a solution and came up with the concept of a web-extension. Despite the fact that Mohammed and Anna had never worked on an extension before, they were up for the task.
Lesson 2: Aim for greatness rather than perfection.
Pursuing perfection blindly keeps you back. Others are already rolling out their imperfect apps and growing app audiences while you're attempting to polish a typeface or figure out the optimum button size.
The developers worked with the flow to swiftly reuse the current code while the product manager, Shivani, and the designer, Rob, changed the product goals and specifications. There's always something to improve, refine, or overhaul. That's why upgrades exist. We have a few open questions, we need solutions for and the team is dedicated to resolving them in the upcoming upgrades.
Lesson 3: Keep the user in mind when creating a design. Always.
Listening, learning and observing the users who had the problem with reviewing the product. They were all around us. We spoke to them, got inside their heads and questioned ourselves about the decisions we made. We learned quite a lot from the customers we interacted with and that helped us navigate the solution from a web-page to a web-extension.