Redesigning App Reviews in 3-weeks

As the Marketplace website underwent an overhaul, I was asked to quickly redesign the app reviews experience to fit into the new visual system and tech stack. Over three weeks, I analyzed user journeys - reading, writing, and revisiting reviews - while benchmarking the current experience and identifying key pain points. The new experience was accessible, mobile-friendly, featured a cleaner layout, and improved interactions - all while laying the foundation for quicker delivery of future features.

Background

The Marketplace website underwent a large-scale re-architecture. Although the website served our customers well, it looked and worked differently from other Atlassian web properties. The outdated design language was not only inconsistent, but it also impacted designer productivity and limited the scope of our work. As engineering figured out their approach, the design team saw this as a great opportunity to clear our experience debt and streamline our process to ship new features faster.

For this project, we wanted to work fast and limit our scope. We focussed on the app listing page, the touchpoint with the highest traffic, where customers evaluate and buy apps.

Scope and Hypotheses

App Reviews on Marketplace

Over 3 weeks, I was tasked with improving the ‘Reviews’ experience. Research and data show that reviews are a valuable tool for building trust with customers during their app evaluation journey. On all devices, they see a higher traffic compared to other evaluation touchpoints.

‘Reviews’ are the most interaction-heavy part of Marketplace since they include actions like writing or flagging reviews. While we knew a few pain points from customer research, we did not know how some user actions (like support) manifested in the backend. Additionally, we knew that the site was difficult to use on mobile and was barely compliant with accessibility.

Breaking down the journey

To begin approaching my explorations, I needed to break down the customer journey. At different times, customers visit the reviews tab to read reviews and build trust, write a review and share their feedback, and sometimes modify their review or read the seller’s reply. This led to the design brief:

Digital users already have a mental model of how a review experience should work. While exploring, I also wanted to get an understanding of the popular design patterns in the industry and borrow elements that were common across marketplaces.

Design Proposal

For two weeks, I explored the layout, interactions, and variations of the review experience. The process involved sparring the designs with other designers and getting feedback from the cross-functional team. At the end of the month, I handed off the final proposal to developers. Click on the button to see the final solution in detail!

Proposal for this release

Proposal for upcoming releases

While moving quickly, I wanted to ensure that the layout would scale to include new features like parameter-based ratings and AI summaries in the future.

Maker experience

Along with the customer experience, I also worked on the review experience for app makers. They can read, flag, and respond to reviews posted for their apps.

Device and Accessibility

With this release, the review experience adapts to all devices and breakpoints and is 100% accessible!

Impact & Learnings

Although customer impact is still being measured, there has been a shift in our internal design hygiene and housekeeping. We now have a solid foundation of tokenized, accessible, and system-compliant designs that should considerably reduce the time to ship new features.

Completing this project in 3 weeks pushed me to regulate the time I spend envisioning the future v/s designing within the present constraints. It was also a fun exercise in interaction design and design-developer collaboration!

(BONUS)

Discarded Explorations

Sneak peek into some of the explorations I considered, but later discarded.