Star Rating & Reviews
Surfacing star ratings & driver reviews to parking operators in the SpotHero B2B app to decrease supply issues per park, hold operators accountable, and increase driver retention.
Project Stats
10
Weeks Timeline
(5 sprints)
(5 sprints)
3
Internal Usability Tests
2
Operator Usability Tests
Team
Lele Nelson - Product designer
Anthony Arguelles- Product manager (PM)
Alexey Zinger - Engineering manager (EM)
Sami Meyers - Product marketing specialist
Cross - team assist
Claire Giovanoni - B2C Product designer
Anthony Arguelles- Product manager (PM)
Alexey Zinger - Engineering manager (EM)
Sami Meyers - Product marketing specialist
Cross - team assist
Claire Giovanoni - B2C Product designer
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Key Skills
Cross-team collaboration, data visualization, end-to-end product design
Displaying star ratings and reviews will give operators insight into driver feedback
The Control Panel B2B app helps parking operators manage inventory and rates via SpotHero.
This project aims to create feedback loops with operators by offering insights into driver experiences to improve parking operations.
Positive experiences lead to repeat customers, boosting revenue for both SpotHero and operators while reducing customer service costs.
This project aims to create feedback loops with operators by offering insights into driver experiences to improve parking operations.
Positive experiences lead to repeat customers, boosting revenue for both SpotHero and operators while reducing customer service costs.
Unsatisfactory driver experiences raise SpotHero's overhead costs through more customer support inquiries
Improved parking experiences boost ratings, loyalty, retention and engagement, and can reduce customer service costs .
Design Goals
Inspire Change
Decrease Overhead
Increase Engagement
Discovery
driver retention on SpotHero
Star rating from drivers was found to be positively correlated with driver retention to using SpotHero.
Before I joined SpotHero, the data science team ran an analysis to figure out which factors might influence whether drivers keep using SpotHero.
A higher star rating boosts driver return rates, motivating teams at SpotHero to prioritize quality experiences at the facility level.
A higher star rating boosts driver return rates, motivating teams at SpotHero to prioritize quality experiences at the facility level.
Discovery Research Goals
Review and analyze existing work across the organization
By reviewing star rating data from in-house experts (such as internal ops and data science teams), I can gain insights into what drives operators to take action.
Understand & match operator mental model
Understanding the operator's mental model for managing a parking facility will help design a solution that delivers actionable feedback.
What type of feedback is most important to operators
What driver feedback matters most to operators, and how detailed should these metrics be? This will guide the type of data we share and how to visualize it effectively.
How to rate in the driver facing B2c app
Before this project, drivers could rate their parking experience after the reservation ended by leaving a star rating and/or an open-text comment.
Limited star rating reporting in B2B app
Before this project, the implementation of the star rating in the control panel app lacked granularity. It did not display details such as the number of reviews or verbatim comments from reviewers.
User research with Operators
I set up research sessions to speak with parking operators to understand what kind of feedback from drivers they would like to hear and would action on.
Operators want contextualized, prioritized, and tactical feedback
Operators are self empowered individuals that want to do their own due diligence. They prefer to hear about issues that are within their control like safety and cleanliness concerns.
Operators want to embrace competition to elevate the parking industry
Operators have called for SpotHero to streamline the parking industry by fostering competition and eliminating operators from the platform that don't provide a quality parking experience. Operators generally expressed wanting to always improve their offering.
Operators want to dig into the data and do due diligence themselves
Operators stated how important it was to have a low star rating contextualized with comments or some other type of data to diagnose the issue themselves and share with their bosses.
Collabing with Spothero field ops team
The SpotHero field ops team sent emails to operators with low star ratings, guerilla style. I intercepted these operators to have a chat.
The Field Ops team at SpotHero is responsible for addressing persistent customer issues that occur "in the field," specifically at parking facilities.
I was particularly interested in operators who responded to the driver feedback emails, as I wanted to engage with them directly. To encourage participation, I offered gift cards as an incentive to discuss their responses in more detail.
I was particularly interested in operators who responded to the driver feedback emails, as I wanted to engage with them directly. To encourage participation, I offered gift cards as an incentive to discuss their responses in more detail.
After intercepting email respondents and meeting with them, I found that operators wanted specific details from review data
To facilitate the conversation, I created three low-fidelity concepts to explore which elements captured operators' interest. Operators expressed a strong desire for key details, such as the time of incidents, as this information would help them identify patterns in the data and prioritize addressing issues more effectively.
Ideation
After sharing mockups with operators, I analyzed their feedback to design a solution that displays key metrics, review data, and insights to guide decision-making and address negative feedback.
Reaching a design limitation
I believed sharing review comments and reservation times with operators was essential for providing operators actionable steps. However sharing that data would require cross-team collaboration and buy-in.
Key portion of solution descoped
The qualitative review comment portion of my design solution was descoped. The feature was descoped due to the need for cross-team collaboration, and those teams had limited bandwidth.
My team decided to focus on ratings only instead, so I designed a "ratings over time" solution to help operators track their performance quantitatively.
My team decided to focus on ratings only instead, so I designed a "ratings over time" solution to help operators track their performance quantitatively.
But I gained buy-in from other teams, and they designed an upstream solution to better collect review data from drivers.
Raw open-text review comments are difficult to analyze and present to operators at scale. We were also concerned that irrelevant comments could reduce engagement, so a moderation process would be necessary.
However, with buy-in from other teams, the need to develop a moderation practice could be bypassed.
However, with buy-in from other teams, the need to develop a moderation practice could be bypassed.
Cross Team Collaboration
Working with b2c designer
My work drew attention, inspiring Claire, a B2C designer on the Acquisition team to address the design problem. Her team, which focuses on acquiring new SpotHero users, created a solution to better collect and quantify driver reviews, responding to operators' desire for more review data.
The birth of quick prompts solution
Claire conducted research with drivers and developed a solution using quick prompts, a common approach in the field, to help operators track driver experience patterns in a quantifiable way.
The finished b2c product
Claire's team and mine held weekly design reviews to refine the prompts, resulting in a great solution for driver reviews in the SpotHero app.
an epic fast follow by my b2b team
With review comments removed from my initial design, displaying review prompts to operators became our alternative B2B solution.
With the roadmap adjusted, we focused on implementing customer prompts in production. Next, we planned to address surfacing review prompts in the B2B app, using the new quantifiable data source, with future iterations aimed at including review comments.
I iterated on sketched ideas from the ideation session
I took the mocked up ideas from the ideation session, did some sketches of my own, and continued refining the product further with key stakeholders.
Refining & Usability Testing
Stakeholder Iterations
I met with my Engineering Manager to refine my concept for tags in the B2B app, which helped me clarify the metrics and definitions of star ratings for operators.
I met with the Director of Product Design for visual feedback, and thankfully, I gained much more than I expected!
I conducted another design review with the broader design team to ensure that users, even with limited understanding of the data visualizations, could easily interpret their meaning.
design Going into usability testing
After my design review with the broader design team, I developed a simplified concept that better highlighted the overall feedback from drivers and provided a detailed breakdown of the types of tags submitted.
goals of Usability testing
Determine digestibility of metrics provided
Can the operator understand what the metrics are telling them, and how to improve on a metric?
Determine if metrics provided are sufficient
Are the tags sufficient to provide an operator with a good picture of what is happening at their facility?
.png)
Determine what other data points would help
Does the operator need review comments or other reservation details to fully understand the tags?
Usability Insights
Positive User Feedback
Highly usable, clear data points. Operators drawn to the negative tags immediately so they can see what they need to fix.
Users were able to read the star rating graph and understand the differences between their star rating over time.
Loved seeing competitor comparison to get a sense of how prevalent issues are in their area. Operators are very competitive.
Pain Points Revealed
Confusion on the collection process of the tags. Perhaps a tooltip explaining the collection process of the tags would help.
Users really wanted to see the review comments associated with tags so they can dig deeper into the individual circumstances.
More alignment needed for iteration
Review comments were initially scoped out due to internal constraints, but I pushed to surface them for operators, as they allow operators to action on time and details of incident. Further alignment and processes were needed to make this possible.
I laid the foundation for future iteration toward my desired solution
To address the descoping of my key feature, I worked with the data science team to create an internal admin page for SpotHero employees to view star ratings, review tags, and driver comments.
This initiative allowed internal teams to proactively engage with operators receiving low reviews. It also laid the foundation for future iterations of showing review comments to operators, including review moderation to ensure only relevant feedback is surfaced, minimizing engagement risks.
This initiative allowed internal teams to proactively engage with operators receiving low reviews. It also laid the foundation for future iterations of showing review comments to operators, including review moderation to ensure only relevant feedback is surfaced, minimizing engagement risks.
The Solution... for now!
Surfacing driver feedback in the SpotHero B2B app encourages positive changes in the parking experience
By surfacing patterns of unhappy drivers to operators in a self-service way, operators can take action to address concerns, reducing internal overhead from customer dissatisfaction. We believe improving star ratings will boost SpotHero's driver retention.
"Final" Product
Measuring Success
Tracking supply issues per park
Before the feature's release, supply issues per park were evaluated, tracking how often customer service is contacted about park-related issues compared to the total parks managed by SpotHero. This lagging metric requires long-term monitoring to assess the feature's impact.
Tracking improvements to star rating over time
Before the feature's release, average and median star ratings across facilities were measured. As a lagging indicator, this metric requires long-term monitoring to assess its impact.
Project Reflection
01. Continuing to advocate for the user is not a linear path!
Due to key design elements being descoped, I focused on advocating for cross-functional collaboration to address user needs. I pushed for alternative solutions to bring actionable designs to life, and while the feature couldn't be implemented immediately, I'm proud to have laid the groundwork for future integration.
02. Cross team collabs make the dream work!
Presenting actionable data to other teams can drive meaningful cross-team collaboration. I created clear, digestible documentation of my insights, which helped inspire a new roadmap item for the upcoming quarter.
03. Speaking with eng early and often helps you think differently as a designer
I appreciate how engineers think—logical and critical. The analysis from my engineering manager helped me understand our data intricacies, which streamlined the data I planned to show operators and validated my approach.
Shout out to smashingstocks for their cool illustrations I used in this case study.
