Skipper’s Review: A Product Design Story
SkippersReview.com is a company located in Fort Lauderdale, FL. They are heavily involved in the marine community and are focused on providing a trustworthy, destination website for customers to review their experience working with marine service providers. Using the service, boaters are able to find high-quality vendors in their communities.
Skipper’s Review engaged Flower Press Creative Studio, LLC to provide a complete end-to-end design and build for their custom web app.
The Problem:
“When my son was 12, I wanted to buy him a boat. I knew next to nothing about boating at the time. I was sold a lemon. I thought, there has to be a better way to find quality and trustworthy resources in the boating community. ”– Founder, Skipper’s Review
The Solution
SkippersReview.com is a destination website for boating enthusiasts looking for the best service providers, retail sales operators and marine entertainment opportunities that the community has to offer. Business owners create listings and consumers review their experiences working with different vendors. The result is a community curated list of the best and brightest marine vendors in a particular location.
Process & Research Methods
Stakeholder Interviews
We started our design process with stakeholder interviews. We met with the Founder and the now CTO to determine proposed features. We quickly mapped out the proposed information architecture and feature set. There would be two account types, one for businesses, and the other for consumers. Businesses would sign up for free, and consumers would pay for access to quality reviews. Based on early notes we sketched out the following rough architecture:
Secondary Research
Following stakeholder interviews, we needed to determine what solutions were in the marketplace. We found comparable review sites. Angie’s List had a similar model. Consumers paid for access to a list of curated reviews. Businesses joined for free. Reviews are validated by a moderator. However, Angie’s List did not service the marine industry. Yelp.com offered categorized business reviews primarily for restaurants, retail stores and service providers. But again, Yelp offered few reviews for boating, or related providers. We located several static listings of marine services providers in various cities. None offered reviews. There was no existing customer-generated review site focused on the marine industry. This gave Skipper’s Review a unique value proposition.
Prototyping
Many of the core features for Skipper’s Review were relatively straightforward. User registration, profile setup, account management, search, support pages etc. We quickly created lo-fidelity wireframes and a prototype to capture these core concepts. We focused first on the business owner user experience.
To make registration easy, we planned to pre-populate the Skipper’s Review database with businesses and allow owners to claim their profiles. This would enable them to validate their address and basic information instead of keying it in.
For many boating businesses, Skipper’s Review would represent their only online presence. We wanted to make business detail pages rich and useful.
To ensure that information would be populated by business owners, we proposed a wizard-style registration flow. Basic business information was required
After information was partially populated we surfaced a profile preview and suggested optional enhancements.
Business User Interviews
Once initial wireframes were completed, we created a prototype for early user testing. To check out the prototype review the project on Invision.
Our goal was to focus on business owners and understand if the signup process and basic feature set would work for them. We conducted in-person interviews with five small business owners in the boating industry. Each represented a different subset of the market. We asked each owner to complete the following tasks and talk aloud as they went:
1. Read about what Skipper’s Review offers Business Owners
2. Register for a Business Account
3. Complete your Business Profile
Key Findings:
1. Users easily located the Skipper’s Review Business Center to read about business account features.
2. Users appreciated the fact that their information was pre-populated and they would not need to fill out all address information.
2. Users clicked Join to signup for the service, and found the “search for your business profile” intuitive.
3. Users found the wizard-style sign-up process easy-to-use.
We asked business owners to take a look at populated profile pages to identify any information that was missing and provide overall feedback
Key Findings:
1. Users liked the overall appearance of the page, and the information available.
2. Users asked about the review moderation system and how quality and accuracy of reviews would be ensured. Users were unsure about the proposed flagging system.
3. Users seemed concerned about members of the public being able to post photos with reviews and asked if moderation would include review of photos.
We made adjustments based on this feedback (including enhancing documentation in the FAQs section about review moderation), and moved on to focus on consumer accounts.
Additional Wireframing & Prototyping
For consumers basic functions included search, write a review and support. Consumers would have no public facing profile. Their primary functions on the site were to find businesses they could trust, and review their favorite businesses so other shoppers could find them.
The Skipper’s Review homepage would be spare and simple with keyword search and categories for Boating Services and Retail Sales.
The search results page would contain key information to make hiring decisions including: business name, description, number of reviews and ratings.
We wanted the write a review page to be simple and easy-to-interact with. Adding photos to reviews would bring life to each user’s unique purchase experience.
Detailed reviews within business pages were the primary selling point for Skipper’s Review. We wanted to make the presentation compelling and simple to access.
Consumer User Interviews
Once consumer pages were completed we got a group of four consumers together for interview-style usability testing. We asked users to complete the following tasks and talk aloud as they went:
1. Register for an account
2. Search for a business
3. Read about businesses and select one to hire. Contact them.
4. Write a review for a business you’ve used before
To check out the prototype review the project on Invision.
Key Findings:
1. Users were impressed with the simple, but robust feature set on Skipper’s Review. The interface was clean, and straightforward. They appreciated the amount of information available on each profile.
2. Search provided all of the necessary information.
3. Users felt that all the fields on write a review seemed excessive.
4. Users asked about review moderation and how likely reviews were to get approved.
With this feedback in mind, we made minor adjustments before proceeding with visual design.
Brand Identity & Visual Design
To kickoff visual design we started by creating a brand identity and tagline. The mark is an anchor, with a star in the center. The star represents user ratings and reviews. We used a clean, modern font and a simple tagline “Boaters Know Best.” Next we established a color palette.
The basic site is spare and simple with blue, white, grey and orange as the primary palette.
The business center is colorful and informative. Recent business signups are featured on the logged out business center homepage along with testimonials.
Search results came out much like the wireframe with review and meta information front and center.
Business detail pages are information-rich with a clean layout.
If data is not populated, sections do not show. This keeps overall presentation clean and free of clutter.
Build & Launch
Skipper’s Review was built using custom HTML/CSS/JS. They launched with a desktop-only interface to save on initial build costs, but plan to swap to a responsive interface within the next year. The back-end contains PHP and MySQL on a Laravel framework. It includes proprietary search algorithm, an admin tool with content moderation, user moderation and custom optimization features. Payment integration was handled through Stripe. The system is growing organically over time, with new features being added monthly.
Results
Since launch, businesses registered on Skipper’s Review have grown quickly in Florida and the Southeastern United States. Beginning in late summer 2016, businesses across the country have been added to the database. Skipper’s Review is gaining traction through boat shows, social media marketing and word of mouth.
“Skipper’s Review is growing. We have seen impressive traction to date. Skipper’s Review has a goal to build the largest, most trusted boating community online. We have many plans in the works to keep pushing toward that goal.” — Founder, Skipper’s Review
For more information on the project, visit the project page on our studio site. For additional information on our design process check out our approach page. Please feel free to add feedback in the comments.
Thanks!
Khaiersta Flowers English is Founder and Creative Director of Flower Press Creative Studio, a full-service website design and development studio in Seattle, WA.
