ModCloth and the Winston Awards

Online participation is sometimes a challenge to promote, but by running a contest campaign for the “Best Review” with The Winston Awards will help increase participation. Reviews are an integral part of an E-Commerce site because the customer wants to learn as much as they can about the product, and find reassurance, before they purchase it online. Reviews help the customer make the decision to buy an item; since the customer cannot touch, feel or smell the item, a “Real World” reviewer gives them advice and tells them about their purchase experience.

With the Winston Awards project, another challenge is designating the winners on the detail pages, without distracting from other information. To overcome the challenge, I used a standard that customers are already familiar with: the animated slider. Customers will use the blue arrows to scroll through all the winners. Since most of the winning reviews were fairly long, there is a “read more” link at the end of the review snippet. I think this would also be a great place to use an animated slide down, to reveal the remaining text of the review, so that the customer does not have to navigate away from the page. Additionally, there is a link that navigates to the product being reviewed. This serves as a hook to interest the customer in other items.

It makes a lot of sense to display the winners on the product detail page because that is where the customer may post a review. Since the goal of the contest is to encourage more customers to write reviews, by highlighting winners on the detail page we are bringing customers closer to the call to action, executed by the “Leave a Review”. I have accentuated the call to action button by placing the Winston Awards logo beside it, wrapped in ribbons that point toward the button. In addition, I put the logo on the right of the button because Winston’s face also points towards the button and brings the customer’s eye inward. I chose to use the Winston logo that was used in last year’s blog post to allow for recognition. Reviewers who competed last year will be familiar with Winston, and I believe it is an important branding device to continue to use the same image so that each time ModCloth runs the campaign it will build upon that recognition.

Finally, I added a designation to one of the reviews further down the page as an example of how I would designate the winners in the regular review section. I wanted to keep it simple, so I thought a gold star would be the perfect reward for a well-written review. The gold star could be a permanent fixture on the winning review. I thought it would also be nice to have a tooltip on the gold star to let people know more information about the Winston Awards.