Mobile Review Invitations
The Power of Personalization in End Consumer Flows
Every single day, Podium users send out about 1M+ review invites, and yet this small but mighty flow lacked personalization, approachable and engaging language, and updated design components.
Product Background
Despite it being Podium’s flagship product, the Reviews experience hadn’t been touched in close to 5 years by the time myself, Bryson Benson (Sr. Product Designer), and Imasha XX (Product Manager) got a hold of it.
Since the company’s inception in 2014, Reviews were the leading sales pitch, driving the most leads to local businesses by increasing star ratings and rankings on Google and other search engines.
Why It’s Important
The review invite flow, in particular, is unique because our users send it out to their customers. Their customers then click on the link, select the review site of their choice (typically Google), and submit their star rating. It’s the most visible of Podium’s flows, and it’s not even hosted within our product—kinda wild, right?
Ultimately, our users entrust us to make an effective, seamless experience for their customers, so they can engage with their happiest customers to get the 5 stars they need.
Current Experience Issues
The flow used old design components that weren’t consistent with our current system, including off-brand color palettes and buttons.
The content was unclear, grammatically incorrect, and overall un-engaging.
The tone of voice is quite stale and flat for a flow that’s meant to meet after a positive business interaction (i.e. 5-stars).
The confirmation screen didn’t provide any other forward actions and missed key conversion opportunities for Podium as a business.
My Our Thought Process
Step 1: Collect current data.
We dug up as much data as possible to better understand consumer behavior before jumping into our redesign. We partnered with our Data Analyst to dig into both the user and end consumer funnels.
Step 2: Pick apart the current flow.
The designer, PM, and myself had an open brainstorm and jam session about the design and content issues. We talked about our timeline, milestones, and stakeholders.
Step 3: Identify key priorities.
After feeling more confident in our understanding of the old flow, we identified our priority changes including on-brand design components, personalization, and forward conversion paths.
Step 4: Jam on the solution.
Then, we had a no-holds-bar jam session on what the possibilities were in front of us.
Sticky notes and grey-box designing galore.
Step 5: Tested, got feedback, iterated.
As usual, our first experiment involved launching to a select number of users and iterating from what we learned including proper button sizing, content hierarchy, and tone of the confirmation screen.
Step 6: A/B test old vs new.
Finally, the time had come to put it to the real test. Spoiler: the new flow won. On every level. Check it out in detail below! :)
What Changed to Get Those Results ⭐️
Personalization: I knew we needed to add the business’s name, so we could help reinforce user confidence in the secure link and continue their (hopefully 5-star) consumer experience.
Approachable Language: Instead of using half-sentences in the old flow, I used conversational, plain language with full sentences to convey an approachable yet professional tone. We believe this change, coupled with more personalization, resulted in a 67% increase in completion.
Clearer Instructions: We knew that consumers sometimes didn’t understand why they needed to sign into Google to leave a review. By writing “Continue with Google,” we help prime the user into what’s coming next, decreasing time-to-complete by 66% increase.
Conversion Paths: On the confirmation screen, we made the marketing opt-in more enticing and obvious. Plus, we added a prompt for our free trial, which got 100+ daily avg clicks (Higher paid plans would be able to remove this prompt.)
Future Iterations
Looking back, what would I want to change or improve? How could we continue to push the experience forward?
Make sure periods are in all the headings. That’s actually already logged in the “Fast Follows.”
Adjust the color of the illustrations in the background to enhance the contrast between the buttons.
Make sure the variable in the eyebrow text grabs the location (city, state) instead of the “name” of the location (which would always be the same anyway).
Make the review confirmation a little smaller and animated, while giving a bit more prominence to the marketing opt-in, since that’s the ideal next-step.
What We Learned
There’s always a ton of lessons, big and small, in every project. Here’s just a few top of mind.
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Personalization helps users not only feel seen and validated but also feel more confident and trustworthy of the flow they’re interacting with. Plus, adding our customers’ business’ name in the flow enhances our customers’ trust in our products, knowing we’re doing our best to make our flows tailored to their success.
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Bryson is such a talented designer, and his designs really helped clear the way for a smooth E2E experience. From aligning with our design system to keeping the focus on the consumer actions, the new flow retains a clear success path while elevating the brand experience — not just of Podium but of the business itself.
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When we dove into this problem space, we had to reckon with the fact that this invite flow wasn’t just representing Podium as a brand and platform but it also was representing our customers’ businesses in their customers’ eyes. It was a humbling experience knowing that our customers deserved our full effort in making this flow more professional, engaging, and effective.