Bringing Smiles to Rides: a new visual rating design for customers
the problem
In the first quarter of 2024, it was revealed that 60% of the reason for low rating by customers was that they assigned it "by mistake". It was discovered that most of the customers did not understand the rating mechanism and would randomly press any button. Furthermore, there was a need to educate them on proper usage as poor ratings presented potential risks. Bykea takes pride on its efficient customer service it has been lauded by customers and partners as the standalone core component in its stability and growth and standing out from competitors.
the solution
After discussions with key stakeholders, it was discovered that the current rating star-rating system was de-humanizing and did not value the customers. We wanted to keep seeing this rating data evolve and brainstormed ideas into replacing the starts with other visuals to enhance the rating experience into more human-centered. We simmered it down to two solutions.
- A binary thumbs up or thumbs down
- Emoticons or facial expressions for each rating number: Angry for 1, Sad for 2, Neutral for 3 Happy for 4 and Wide Smile for 5.
We deduced that introducing facial expressions and emoticons was the right direction as other platforms in the market besides mobility including e-commerce, retail, workplace management all utilized emoticons for an efficient customer experience.
As the product designer for this short yet impactful task, I explored various emoticons on the internet and came across a set which was satisfactory to our needs. The the emojis are two-dimensional with solid colors and not too detailed with linear gradient effects or shadows as their sizes would increased resulting in greater loading latency.
After agreeing on the emoji set, we tested out the ratings with a users. To our satisfaction, they were pleased with the implementation and they finally felt connected with us. They felt Bykea acknowledged them as key stakeholders in the product growth.
impact
The update from stars to emoticons had an impact and within four months by Q3, the mistake of assigning low ratings by customers fell to 44%. Our work is ongoing as we constantly experimenting on our ratings system and looking for improvement in other areas including prompts.