Portfolio > Hotwire
Hotwire traveler reviews
The challenge
24 hours after a Hotwire user’s trip ends, an email survey is sent asking them to review their experience. The content team wanted to create a rich feedback loop where a higher quality survey would elicit richer data to display on the product page.
My role
- Collaborated with UX to shape a cleaner, easier “multiple choice” survey.
- Worked with engineering to understand how a database full of hotel review text could be mined to create editorial tags about the hotel and neighborhood.
The results
I researched and mapped the journey of a user review, which hadn’t been documented in detail. Hotwire’s process was manually moderated which led to lower completion rates. My research uncovered an automated Expedia review system that Hotwire could adopt.
Skills
UX Design, Information Architecture, Data Mining, Taxonomy
Requesting a review
The old survey
The old survey form was visually unappealing with a text-dense layout, cold and mechanical copy and poor content and visual hierarchy.
We wanted to create a rich feedback loop where more reviews led to richer metadata which could then be displayed on the product page. The quality of what goes in affects the quality of what comes out, so tuning the post-stay survey was key to a well-functioning system.
The new survey
The redesigned form was much cleaner with clearly structured content and visual hierarchy and easier multiple choice questions as well as tags to make responding less taxing.
The journey of a review
The team knew very little about what happened to a review once written. I mapped all of the steps from submission to moderation to database. Moderation was manual, resulting in higher cost, more rejected reviews and longer turnaround time. I discovered that Expedia had dynamic review moderation which led to Hotwire exploring adoption.
Making reviews more editorial
Text reviews for every Hotwire hotel are compiled in a single text file and data mined for high occurrences of certain words, which can then be turned into tags that describe the neighborhood and the hotel. Hotwire publishes content at such scale that standardizing and templatiziing content for hotels, cars, and flights is the only way to publish content efficiently. For the content team, that made it harder to inject unique, editorial content into the experience. A tagging system generated by automated data mining was one way to create more color. Below is part of a spreadsheet that shows each hotel with associated tags.
