Social Context Widget

Amazon in 2013 Q4

Responsibilities: UX + Visual design

Overview   

Amazon Social team believed that knowing what friends think matter and it can help customers make purchase decisions. For customers who connected their Facebook accounts with Amazon, we have an access to unique data - their Facebook friends and for friends who were also connected, their activities on Amazon and likes on Facebook. Social context widget is an add-on feature to product pages on Amazon and communicates  if their friends showed interest in the product they were viewing. Via this widget, customers could see if their Facebook friends have reviewed, rated, wished for a product on Amazon, or liked a relevant page on Facebook.

Designs

I set three design goals: i) integrate well into the product detail page , ii) create a framework that can accommodate different activity types and varying amount of activities, and iii) address a potential privacy concern by communicating why customers are seeing this information and if they want, allow them to easily disable this widget. 

Results & next steps

We ran this experiment in multiple categories, including Kindle devices and Amazon Instant Video, and got the quantitative as well as qualitative data that supported our assumption. In addition to having statistically significant sales lift, we received positive feedback from customers, who were knowingly connected their accounts, that this information increased their confidence in making shopping decisions.  However, we also received negative comments from some customers who weren't aware of their connected account status. The team proactively addressed the further privacy concern by running email campaigns to connected customers and informing them of their account status. 

With the success of this experiment, the next step was to increase the coverage of this widget. In addition to launching it in more categories, one option was to drive awareness of this feature and increase a number of customers who connect their accounts. Refer to Social Connect Drive to learn more about this approach. We also experimented with context types that can be surfaced to a broader set of customers. These tests include i) friends of friends context, ii) location based context, and iii) Amazon Mom/Student context.