Five stars

An improved experience for product reviews.

The problem 

Our users value the opinions of other IT pros much higher than those of regular consumers, and honest reviews for tech products are hard to find. Spiceworks has had a product reviews section of their community for some time, but we weren't seeing much traffic because our product pages were confusing and lacked useful information. The process for writing a review was also too basic to encourage helpful user generated content.

Talking to our users

We started by doing research on other reviews and ratings sites catering to tech products, and asking users where they go to find unbiased information on products they're thinking about purchasing for their company. We also asked users to rank things like star ratings, pricing information, usage data, and in-depth write ups to see what kind of content they want to see most.

Building from the ground up

The product pages on Spiceworks had a lot of usability and information hierarchy issues that caused our users to struggle to find anything useful. We decided to do a full overhaul of the experience and build it fresh on a new platform. This gave me the flexibility to design a full product reviews experience that felt modern and intuitive.

PRoduct pages

The first thing I tackled were the product pages themselves. Using our research as a guide, I designed new product details pages that emphasizes the information IT pros care about most. That includes: accurate specs, ratings and reviews from the community, data on usage across company sizes and industries, and real-world situations where the product is implemented.

New features

One new feature we added to product reviews is Q&A. The Spiceworks Community is already the place IT pros go to get technical advice, so we wanted to further utilize that advantage by allowing users to post questions about the product on the product page and get answers from both the vendor and other pros. We also surface these in an existing "answer questions" game in the Community to increase visibility.

In our user interviews, we learned that IT pros wanted to see stats on how a product is used by industry, company size, and in combination with other tech products. 

Building a better search page

A major point of confusion in our old product reviews experience was the search results pages and category pages. There were too many sub-categories, inconsistent naming, and broken filtering all adding to a lot of frustration in trying to find a product. We revamped these pages completely, following e-commerce best practices. Another improvement we added was a predictive search to help our users get to the right product faster.

Save to list & Compare

Another missing piece in product reviews was the ability to save products to a shortlist for comparison shopping. Part of our redesign included looking into how IT pros research products and groom the contenders for purchase. I designed out a flow for creating lists, adding products, and then comparing those products side-by-side before finally submitting a request for quotes from tech vendors.

The Results

Six months after launch, we are seeing an increase in traffic to product pages, and much more in-depth user reviews. We've begun working on getting product reviews better integrated into the larger Spiceworks Community to increase traffic and user generated content even more. Also, the new product reviews experience has lead the way for other parts of the community to get full, responsive re-designs.

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