Designing a scalable reviews widget for multi-user impact
Background
Shoppers weren’t noticing social proof on retail partner homepages, which hurt trust and conversions. Flowbox’s Ratings & Reviews MVP included product page widgets, but these didn’t capture attention early enough to influence shopper behaviour.
Challenge
How could we make social proof visible and engaging on retail partner homepages while keeping the design flexible for different brands and consistent across the platform?
Impact
+25% increase in user engagement
of retail partners on Flowbox platform
+3.4% increase in customer base
after 4 months
Improved shopper usability
and reduced platform maintenance
Evolved the design system
into a scalable and accessible foundation
Team
My role
End-to-end design
Design system
Timeline
Apr - May 2023 (1 month)
Full story
Flowbox: empowering global brands with authentic UGC
Flowbox is a B2B SaaS platform helping 850+ retail partners worldwide turn authentic user-generated content into powerful marketing. Operating in 40+ countries, it drives engagement through a subscription-based model.
As one of only two designers at Flowbox, I collaborated across product, engineering, customer success & sales teams, leading end-to-end design for four products, including Ratings and Reviews.
Introducing Ratings
and Reviews
Ratings and Reviews is Flowbox’s latest product, helping retail partners collect shoppers’ written testimonials and use them for product marketing. Its MVP was launched in early 2022.
Widgets: the core of Ratings and Reviews
Widgets were central to Ratings & Reviews, helping retail partners collect and display shopper feedback. The MVP included two product page widgets - a star rating and a review list with a CTA to submit feedback.
How Ratings & Reviews work
A social media manager first customizes a widget and embeds it in the online store. Shoppers can then write product reviews, which are collected in the “Moderate Reviews” dashboard. From there, the manager decides which reviews to publish. Once approved, the reviews appear on product pages, giving future shoppers the social proof they need to trust and buy.
Product problems
Shoppers landing on retail partner homepages weren’t seeing enough social proof early in their journey. This reduced trust in products and the brand, lowered engagement with the review system, and ultimately hurt conversions.
2. Social media managers needed flexible, easy-to-customize widgets that wouldn’t increase operational effort.
Solution
Expanding widget scope to boost trust and conversions
To address the problem with shoppers lacking social proof early, together with the PM, I expanded the scope beyond product pages to address not just shopper trust but also brand visibility, SEO, and localization
Choosing the right layout
To meet the expanded widget goals, I explored layouts to enhance readability, engagement, and modularity. I initially considered a carousel, but its complexity led the team to adopt a grid layout, which was faster to implement, reusable, and aligned with usability and scalability objectives.
Exploring review card design
Within the grid, I went broad first with card explorations. I designed modular card components that could scale across brands, support multiple languages, and evolve later into direct purchase cards.
Colour accessibility enhancements
I refined existing colour tokens to meet WCAG AA contrast standards, improving readability of text, icons, and interactive elements while maintaining visual consistency.
WCAG improved
From tokens to patterns: systematic consistency
By merging colour tokens into design patterns, accessibility and consistency scaled automatically across the widget library, turning one-off fixes into a systematic standard.
Edge cases and micro-interactions
I partnered with developers to define fallbacks and smooth interactions for edge cases, ensuring a robust, consistent experience while mitigating future implementation risks.
Impact
After launching the updated Publish, we closely monitored key metrics.
Key learnings
Designing for scale and diversity: Built modular UI that works across brands, languages, and products.
Attention to micro-interactions: Subtle UI details like readability and CTAs boost usability and trust.
Operational impact: Consistent components reduce friction and errors for retail partners and internal teams.
