Request Reviews

Company: Sittercity
Sector: Marketplace, childcare
My Role: Product Designer: strategy, UI, research
Project Time: 4 months

Overview

Sittercity is a two-sided marketplace connecting families with caregivers for various services. One of the company’s key goals is to grow a healthy marketplace by providing families with high-quality caregivers. As the lead product designer for the caregiver side, I quickly identified ratings and reviews as an underutilized tool to elevate sitter quality in families' eyes. I brainstormed, proposed, designed, and led end-to-end implementation for an iterative feature in two parts that aligned with our company goals, resulting in a 5% increase in sitters with reviews across the platform.

High-level project goals:

  • Identify the biggest obstacles preventing more caregivers from having reviews.

  • Design an MVP solution that provides a foundation for iteration.

  • Increase the number of families leaving reviews for caregivers in the Sittercity ecosystem.

Defining the area of opportunity

Leveraging the analytics team's efforts to quantify caregiver quality, I used key statistics about ratings and reviews to build a compelling case for this initiative:

CAREGIVERS WITH A REVIEW ARE

2.1x

more likely to receive outreach from a family

9.5x

more likely to receive 50+ messages during their account lifetime

3.6x

more likely to make a connection

20.9x

more likely to match with a family

But wait…why is this a problem?

Mapping our family user journey revealed a significant opportunity for improvement, particularly in how we facilitated and encouraged feedback from families. We identified several key factors contributing to this situation:

  1. Off-platform communication: Families naturally moved their conversations with caregivers off-platform, missing opportunities for in-app engagement.

  2. Incomplete transaction cycle: Without on-platform payments, families lacked a clear endpoint to their experience, where leaving a review would feel natural and valuable.

  3. Membership limitations: Our current premium-only review system unintentionally restricted valuable user-generated content, potentially affecting both retention and acquisition.

These factors created a misalignment: while reviews could dramatically enhance caregiver profiles, families often lacked both the motivation and the means to provide them. By addressing these issues, I saw an opportunity to improve caregiver discoverability, increase platform stickiness, drive user engagement, and ultimately, boost our bottom line through increased matches.

The idea

I proposed an incentive directed at families to leverage the group most motivated to get reviews, the caregivers.

My hypothesis:
The social pressure of a caregiver asking a family to give them a review is enough to motivate a family to come back to the platform and complete a review.

Aligning stakeholders

I hosted two brainstorming sessions to get stakeholder support for prioritizing this work. I needed to make the case the iniative would ladder into our OKR of providing a platform of high-quality caregivers.

The first session was cross-functional with engineering, Customer Success, and Trust & Safety members to identify any major gaps in my thinking and understand the review landscape.

The second was with the product team to identify if any of the assumptions I made were too risky to try without de-risking work.

We concluded the project relied on two essential assumptions:

  1. That parents would be motivated by caregivers asking

  2. That caregivers understood the importance of reviews enough to actually ask for them

De-risking assumptions

The team was willing to take the bet that families would be motivated to give reviews by being asked, but I decided I needed to de-risk our assumption caregivers would be willing to make the ask.

I conducted interviews with caregiver who had reviews to see how they got them and how they felt about them.

Research “snapshots” of real caregivers I shared out with stakeholders

Requirements realized

Out of all the brainstorming and research, I came away with a list of constraints I concluded would make the feature a success

  • More caregivers would use the feature if they felt Sittercity was doing the work of “making the ask”


  • Caregivers should only be able to request from families they had previously connected with once

  • The feature would be more successful if the maximum amount of families could leave reviews


  • We would largely be relying on email notifications given the constraints of our tech stack

To augment or create?

The first step of designing was choosing where the feature would live. Should it be an augmentation of an existing feature or something new that we built for users to discover? My initial assumption was that augmenting something would be faster, so I created a list of possible features that could be augmented.

Our initial approach to improving the review system involved augmenting existing platform areas. However, this path quickly revealed significant technical challenges. Modifying current systems risked creating substantial technical debt, a prospect that didn't excite our development team. Instead, they advocated for building a new solution from the ground up.

Interestingly, this technical preference aligned surprisingly well with our user experience goals. Creating a new feature offered several advantages:

  • Customized User Flow: We could tailor the experience specifically for review collection.

  • Modern Tech Stack: Developing in an updated environment promised faster development cycles and happier developers.

  • Future-Proofing: This approach provided flexibility for future integrations with other features, such as messaging.

Keep it simple

Creating a standalone feature allowed us to elegantly solve two key issues: limiting who caregivers could contact and how many requests they could send. This approach built in smart constraints naturally. However, it shifted our challenge to effectively communicating the feature's functionality and limitations to users.

As I started designing I kept a few core questions in mind


  • Beyond our core design system atoms and molecules, were there other components I could reuse from other places in the product?


  • What essential information did the user need to understand to use the feature?


  • How could I keep the page as simple as possible?

I pulled the design concept of these caregiver cards we had already created to adapt to family users.

My initial designs struggled to streamline the information.

Considering how many different families our average sitters message with, I decided that the search bar should live higher on the page. This gave it priority while allowing users to load more user cards below it.

Over a few critique sessions, two different stakeholders added some great ideas:


  1. A page for the caregivers to check the status of their requests.

  2. Most families don’t post profile photos which makes choosing between a large list of names difficult. So I created a way for caregivers to quickly reference the chat thread they had with a family from the feature.

Lessons in importance

I found myself a bit lost trying to decide how much emphasis on discovery I should put on this feature. I knew the importance of reviews and I wanted every sitter to discover this and use it.


My fellow product designer reminded me to think of the overall product hierarchy. Reviews are important, but are they more important than every other thing?

Articulating the hierarchy of important actions helped me define where I placed the feature and give guidance to our marketing team about how this might be communicated to caregivers.

Feature launch success

The feature was extremely well received by caregivers. After our marketing team sent out a feature launch email, the caregivers sent hundreds of requests. The return rate of families leaving reviews wasn’t as high as we hoped, but over the weeks we started to see the numbers tick up.

More importantly, it got company stakeholders excited about the power of reviews. We proved reviews were important, caregivers were motivated to get them, and families would (to a degree) respond to the incentive.

With this groundwork laid, I followed up with a proposal for phase two- external reviews.

What if we went a little further…

New Problem: Requested reviews help caregivers who are already successful on Sittercity. So how might we help new caregivers send those quality signals more quickly? How might we reduce the friction for families to come back and review caregivers?

Solution: We could allow caregivers to send requests to anyone and create a pathway to reviews that doesn’t require an account.

I proposed we leverage native features so sitters could send a request via any communication medium. Most sitters use Sittercity on their phones, so we should embrace the features available to us.

I knew from research that composing that initial ask to families was the hardest part. So I worked with our content writer to create a prefilled message that auto-populates for sitters. No need to fear the blank page.

On the family side, I designed a low-friction way for non-users to leave reviews while building in checks to balance the concerns from our Trust & Safety teams about bad actors or spamming reviewers.

Launch pt. 2 and reflections

I’ll let the caregivers speak for themselves.

Reflections

This project reinforced several valuable lessons and offered new insights:

  1. Challenge Assumptions: My initial approach was upended by technical realities, reminding me to remain flexible and open to unexpected solutions.

  2. Cross-Functional Synergy: The alignment between technical preferences and UX needs highlighted the importance of close collaboration between design and development teams.

  3. Holistic Problem-Solving: Creating a new feature solved multiple issues simultaneously, demonstrating the power of thinking holistically rather than addressing problems in isolation.

  4. UX Communication is Key: Even the most efficient solution requires clear communication to users. The success of a feature heavily depends on how intuitively its functionality is conveyed.

  5. Adaptability in Design: The process taught me to quickly pivot from technical problem-solving to UX challenges, emphasizing the need for adaptability in product design.