Place Review Reaction

Created a reaction feature to motivate reviewers to write quality reviews,
addressing abuse at the same time.
Role
Product Designer
Team
1 Product Manager,
2 Product Designers (Incl. me),
1 Motion Designer,
Engineer Team
Timeline
Jun 2022 - Jun 2023
Platform
Launched on App
(IOS, Android) and Web.
Key Responbilities
 Opportunity Finder  Captured the users' hidden needs to enhance their experience based on user research and data analysis.
 Team Guide  Made the team aligned based on product principles.
 Co-product management  Not only designing and improving the new feature, but also prioritizing specs and managing risks.

Business Challenge

Promoting visit-verified reviews with incentives led to a side effect of low-quality reviews.

Naver, Korea's search engine, has introduced visit-verified reviews to combat abusive reviews for local businesses. Unfortunately, its incentive system attracted cherry pickers, leaving meaningless reviews solely for rewards, negatively impacting local businesses and genuine reviewers.

Problem statement

How might we motivate our visit-verified reviewers to write quality reviews by a reaction, not an incentive?

To obtain sufficient reviews without incentives, It becomes crucial to encourage genuine reviewers to write quality reviews. Through user interviews, I discovered the opportunity for a reaction and its needs from reviewers and users.

Success Metrics : Reaction Counts (For short term), Reviewer Retention/Activation (For long term)

My Design Process

I led iterative design processes to emphasize the value of visit-verified reviews, and minimize business risks as an influential platform.

Impact

On a daily basis, about 20,000 reviewers receive reactions, which actually motivates them to write more quality reviews.

Background

Wait... What is "Visit-verified reviews"?

A visit-verified review system ensures that only users who verify their visit by scanning a receipt (or verifying their payment history) can leave reviews. This measure was taken in response to the negative impact of fake and aggressive reviews on local businesses, which had become a significant social issue in South Korea.

Opportunity found from user interviews

Users needed to express their reactions to each review in a convenient way.

To determine how to enhance visit-verified reviews, I conducted user interviews with 10 users. The majority of interviewees indicated a willingness to express specific emotions toward each review, such as gratitude or agreement. However, they expressed a preference for a more convenient method to engage with, rather than leaving a comment.

"When I see reviews from people with similar experiences, I want to express my agreement. Now I can't express it, so I just peek at their profile."

"I somtimes wanted to leave a reaction, if a review was exact or  detailed. But there was nothing I could."

"I don't think I will actively leave a comment, but it would be great if I could press a 'helpful' button for a review."

Reviewers also wanted to get reactions. And they were concerned about aggressive comments.

Of the 6 interviewees who frequently leave reviews, all expressed a desire for reactions from others, particularly gratitude for their reviews. However, some reviewers was seriously concerned about receiving negative or aggressive comments. Our team was also aware of the potential harm that a comment feature may attach to the core motivation of our reviewer, which is rooted in the pure passion to help others.

"I would feel delighted to share my pleasant feelings at certain places with others."

"It would feel great to get a notification that my review was helpful."

"I am worried about comments because although I left a sincere comment, others may say it's not."

Design Direction

To design the original reaction feature
to emphasize value of visit-verified reviews
and to motivate our reviewers.

Design Journey

1. Established Product Principles
for Cohesive Team Alignment.

In the kick-off meeting, I realized that each member had different ideas on what the reaction feature should look like, possibly because it is a commonly used feature. To ensure team alignment, I established product principles below.
Our Place Review Reactions should:
  • 🌎 Be universal

    Our reviewers and users come from diverse backgrounds, and thus, its crucial for the reaction feature to be universally understandable and accessible.

  • 🌈 Allow for Diverse Expressions

    When it comes to the reaction feature, it is important to include a sufficient variety of options for users to express their feelings. This will help maximize user engagement.

  • 💞 Motivate Reviewers

    Our reviewers love sharing their experiences to help others looking for information about spots. Therefore, the reaction feature should motivate them in a meaningful way to continue writing reviews.

2. Defined the Initial Set through Research

Research 01

Looked into the comments on other local communities

Since our review did not provide a comment feature, I had limited resources to determine which reactions our users would want to express. To address this, I analyzed comments on other local communities to identify the common feelings or thoughts that users typically express towards place reviews. Here are the most commonly used expressions in the comments.

Reaction version 1

  • 🙆 Agreed

    This was intentionally added instead of just "Ok" option because many users leave comments indicating that how much they are familiar with it described in the posts.

Research 02

Figured out our users' needs from the survey

After setting the initial version above, we collected feedback from users and stakeholders through an internal survey. This survey included asking about their preferred options for responding to a review. We also asked if negative reactions were necessary while being concerned about an abusive use of it.

Reaction version 2

  • 😍 + 😲   →   😍 I Want to Go

    ‍Many respondents considered the “I’ll visit later” and “Looks good” reactions to be too similar, so we merged these into a single reaction called “I want to go”.

  • 😆 Funny

    We added “Funny” which was the most suggested option.

  • 🫤 Not really   →   🤔 Umm...

    ‍About 75% of the respondents wanted to express negative reaction, but reviewers were worried about receiving direct opposition. Therefore, we decided to add negative reactions in more neutral and gentle tone like "Umm."

  • 🙆 Agreed   →   🥺 I Relate

    "Agreed" was ranked as the least useful by respondents because they found it was too specific. Instead, the majority of them wanted to express empathy with the reviewers' feelings. As a result, we changed "Agreed" to "I relate.”

  • 📍 Visit/Review Status Added

    However, users expressed that they would not typically use the rection "Agreed". Nonetheless, they still wanted to indicate that they had visited the place mentioned in a review. Reviewers also wanted to know if the reactions were from previous visitors. Therefore, I designed a feature to display the visit status of those leaving reactions.

3. Validated the Usability of Reactions
by User Tests

I conducted usability tests to ensure that users can easily understand the meaning of each reaction and can use our reaction feature on diverse pages without any problems.
‍
Additionally, I tested the viability of multi-reactions feature. Because the product manger wanted to see if enabling multi-reactions would increase user engagement, as users often express multiple emotions in their comments like "Thanks for your review, I will check this place out later."

Reaction version 3

  • 🖐 Multi-Reactions   →   1️⃣ Single-Reaction

    All participants did not realize that they could input multiple reactions. They also indicated that they would not leave multiple reactions and feel annoyed when prompted to do so.

  • 🥺 I relate   →   🥲 Sad

    Some participants misunderstood the meaning of "I relate" as simply agreement, rather than the empathy in a broader sense that we intended. To clarify, we have decided to narrow it down to "Sad," which empathy for unsatisfied experiences.

  • 🔖 Tooltip Added

    I designed the reaction feature to be compact due to limited space. However, this sometimes made it difficult for users to quickly find the reaction buttons. To improve its visibility, I added a tooltip to the reaction button.

4. Visualized the Reactions in a More Intuitive and Attractive way

To make our reactions more functional and visually appealing, we tested various colors and shapes. However, we found that using different colors for each reaction made it less intuitive, as the colors were not coordinated, and different shapes made it difficult to distinguish the smaller versions of the reactions.
Illustration by Minah Lee
We opted for a yellow-face emoji style, which is familiar and inviting. I also collaborated with the interaction designer to add animation effects to improve the readability and attractiveness of the emojis.

Reaction version 4

Illustration by Minah Lee, Animation Effect by Yangjin Choi

5. Before Launching, Adjusted the Feature Specs Considering Risks and Prioritization

The Risk Management team flagged a concern about the potential use of 'Umm' as an aggressive expression towards our local business owners. This could be critically harmful to the value of our visit-verified reviews. Additionally, the engineering team evaluated the development costs for each specification. To effectively manage risks and costs, the product manager and I decided to simplify the feature, focusing on our goal and design principles.

Reaction version 5

  • 🤔 'Umm' Excluded

    The negative/neutral expression, 'Umm', is excluded due to the potential use for aggressive expression towards our local business owners or our reviewers.

  • ⏭️ 'Visit Status' and 'Expandable Layer' Excluded

    These specifications may enable more authentic interaction, but they are not essential for the reaction feature itself. Therefore, we exclude these specs for the launching version.

6. After the Launch, Quickly Improved based on User Behavior and Feedback

Problem 01

Some radical users used 'Sad' to express their outrage towards.

Although our team excluded 'Umm' due to the potential for aggressive use of reaction features, it happened with 'Sad'.

Problem 02

Users were confused the tab on the reactions list with the reaction button.

I received user feedbacks that they sometimes confused tabs on the reaction list with the reaction button due to their similar interfaces.

Reaction version 6

  • 🥲 Sad  →  😎 Cool

    The product manager and I decided to replace the term 'Sad,' which was being used abusively, with 'Cool' instead of simply removing it. Because some users expressed the desire for a simpler reaction option without specific intentions, such as 'like' or 'thumbs up'.

  • 🆕 Tab Design Changed

    I changed the tab UI to match the tab UI on the "Place End" page. This is because users mostly engage in reactions on that page.

Final Design

Feature 1. Reaction Button

User can leave a reaction consistently on all pages and components of place reviews.

Feature 2. Reaction Notifications

Reviewers receive a notification not as much as feeling overwhelmed.

Since visit-verified reviews are a part of the Naver app, it is important to control the notifications to avoid annoying users. Therefore, we have decided to send two types of notifications in the launching version and track the users' satisfaction.

Feature 3. The List of Who Left Reactions

Reviewers, as well as general users, can check who left a reaction for them.

Feature 4. My Reactions Page

Users are also able to see the reviews they left a reaction before.

Impacts & Takeaways

Some features may be common,
but their design can have a completely different impact.

Reactions are a feature that is typically included in most apps, so it may be easy to overlook. However, during the thorough design journey of this project, I realized that even with a typical feature like this, it can be abused or loved by users depending on how it is designed. Furthermore, it can motivate users and make the product more beloved. I am confident that I have created such a powerful reaction feature for our reviews. ✌️
Well-selected reactions make us distinguish the hidden-but-unique reviews that AI is hard to catch it.

Designed for internal designers
to make our company faster.

During this project, several teams expressed interest in using our emojis. In response, I internally published the emoji assets and created a style guide for easily creating additional emojis in a consistent style. This approach proved to be successful, as the messenger team was able to launch their new reaction feature within a few weeks. It was so pleasing moment to have contributed to other designers as part of one team.
Design guide for Emojis
Applied to other service (Open talk on Naver)

If you'd like to check out
the detailed process,

you can view it on the

🖥 PC

Or, you can reach out

🙋🏻me↗︎