Boatsetter

Boatsetter is "Airbnb for boats" which makes reviews a crucial part of the business. A large quantity of high-quality reviews can significantly increase bookings for a listing. For every booking, a customer will rent a boat and can also hire a captain if they do not have a boating license. The boat and captain can be together (the captain is the owner of the boat) or separate (the owner and captain are independent parties).

My first thought was that writing a review is time-consuming and requires thinking, which means a confusing reviews process is going to turn away users. I spoke to the Customer Experience team to understand what the core issues Boatsetter customers face with reviews. I learned that renters are unclear about who and what they were supposed to review, resulting in reviews that may not accurately reflect their boating experience.

For example, if a renter had a great time with the actual boat but a horrible time with the hired captain, they may average their experience and leave a three star review. However, this may mean the boat was five stars and the captain was one star.

I realized that we needed to clarify what component of the experience the customer is reviewing and make it obvious where to start the process. The first area I tackled was the review itself. After hours of competitive research and several design iterations, I outlined several possible solutions.

I felt that splitting up the review into categories would be an easy way for the customer to understand what they should be thinking about. In addition, I played around with quantitative vs. qualitative scoring. Majority of users expressed that while they were more likely to book a listing that had more written reviews, the act of writing out their experience was more time consuming and therefore a drop-off point when writing their own review.

However, my ideation was constrained by a tight timeline pushed by business objectives. Summer is the "on-season" for boating (naturally with the hotter weather) and more reviews = more bookings = revenue. Thus, we were aiming for as quick of a release as possible and had to de-scope portions of this project.

The end result was a reviews process splitting up boat and captain with increased entry point visibility. There were concerns with the implementation, which included a lack of credibility stemming from the written review portion becoming optional and user annoyance with the new modal.

The primary changes released consisted of:

Being able to simplify the reviews process was an incredibly valuable learning experience because I was able to move through every aspect of the product lifecycle.

I compiled multiple competitive audits at my time with Boatsetter on topics including booking details / itinerary and owner onboarding. However, the feature I spent the most time on was search. I broke apart this project into four sections: search results, search bar, navigation from homepage to search, and navigation from search to search.

First, I made a list of several direct and indirect competitors to analyze. I walked through the search process for each platform and took screenshots of the flows. I also considered two-sided marketplaces such as Etsy and Amazon because I wanted to see how companies that listed a wide spectrum of products approached search.

Then, I gathered common practices and unique features I wanted to highlight using these flows. Below is my final deliverable which I presented directly to the Head of Product and my Senior Product Manager.