Yelp Rex
Yelps' New Food Recommendation Feature!
Team
Osbert Reynaldi
Roles
UI/UX Designer
User Researcher
Graphic Designer
Product Designer
Tools
Adobe Illustrator
Canva
Figma
Skills
User-Centered Design
Market Research
User Research
Visual Design
TIMELINE
August 2022
SUMMARY
CHALLENGE
A new case study, a new adventure.
Throughout my days of using Yelp, I’ve always noticed something missing. Something that would make my life easier. So, I decided to challenge myself; giving myself 5 days to create a new feature. Something I call YelpRex.
Premise:
Food can be anything we want: fun,boring, exciting. This depends on a lot of factors: our psychology, preferences, physical factors like location and of course, the food itself. The challenge for me was to create a meaningful food recommendation system so that every user can have the best experience with food and yelp as an application
ROADMAP
A feature that engages with the user primarily through notifications and widgets. Taking inspiration from the Live Activities feature that is going to be launching with IOS 16, I decided to create a Yelp food recommendation system within users’ lock screen itself. This recommendation will be time-sensitive and also according to user preferences in cuisine. So if Yelp notices the user visits Chinese food pages a lot, it will recommend more Chinese food places.
Recommendations are located within the widget itself as well as time-sensitive notifications. When either are expanded, they show a more detailed layout with all the necessary information about the place of interest. Users are also able to call the place of interest and share to others within the expansion itself!
ANALYZING COMPETITORS AND USERS
MARKET & USER
RESEARCH
Market Analysis
Since Yelp has one major competitor, mainly Google reviews, I decided that it would be best to focus on what Yelp could improve on instead of how Yelp can win market shares over its competitors.
First, let’s take a look at some of Yelp’s metrics and statistics:
- While a good 30% users are between 18 – 34, 36% are aged 35–54, and 33% are more than 55. However, the 35–54 age group is more eager to spend than older generations because they have higher incomes.
- Restaurants get reviewed the most, along with home and local services. These Yelp statistics report that shopping (16%), beauty and fitness (11%), health (8%), and auto (6%) also constitute a significant part of Yelp’s reviewing space. Consumers do not only look for good places to eat, but they trust Yelp on other local services too.
According to another study, 49% of all Yelp reviews are about restaurants. Shopping and home services were next.
From this brief research and study, I concluded that most of Yelp’s user base are part of the younger generation. Thus, more likely to use Yelp’s smartphone app compared to their web app.
Furthermore, Yelp’s metrics seem to agree with the problem at hand. 49% of the reviews on the app are for restaurants. This means that most people who use the app, use it for the purpose of finding local restaurants. We can assume then, that this problem of deciding on which restaurants to visit daily is a problem for a lot of users.
But first, What led to me to solve this "problem" in the first place?
For context, this 45 minute routine is something that happens to me everyday. Still.
IDEATION, FLOW, DESIGN
UI/UX & GRAPHIC
DESIGN
Affinity Map
After researching about the market and demographics, I decided to collect inquiries that I thought were the most pressing. I wanted to implement a new feature that would improve Yelp and integrate this into Yelp’s real-time functionality; in terms of widgets and notifications. Thus, I created a digital affinity diagram in Figma.
After listing my thoughts and opinions on each of the categories/questions, I came to a realization. Yelp needs to take advantage of IOS’ notification system as well as newer IOS features to improve User Experience; making it an element of interest for Yelp users.
User Flow
To create an inviting, interesting and appealing user interface, I identified the user flow. My goal when solving this problem, is so that users will have an easy and seamless experience when finding out what to eat. This includes all the essential and necessary information about the place of interest as well as a self-explanatory interface. I used Figma to create 3 separate flowcharts: 1 for the lock screen widget, 1 for the notification, and 1 for the expanded notification/widget.
Initial Sketches and Ideation
Low-Fidelity Wire-Framing
After designing different lock screen possibilities, animations and also experimenting with different expanded notification layouts, I landed on a finalized design. However, in this stage of the design process all there is is a low-fidelity design in Figma as I need to test its functionality first.
High-Fidelity Design
UI/UX & GRAPHIC
DESIGN
FINAL INTERFACE AND EXPERIENCE
Final Experience
Key Takeaways
Compared to my previous case study, this one was quite a different experience. At first, I debated whether to create a whole new app to support this feature of recommendation or integrate it as a part of Yelp. But, I decided in the end that Yelp already had all the functionality needed to support this feature and this feature would also be too small to be its own application. Thus, I chose the latter.
At first, I was intimidated by the thought of redesigning the IOS interface especially since its related to an unreleased IOS version. However, as soon as I designed the first expanded lock screen layout, the intimidation turned to excitement. It was really cool to be able to design something totally new and improve an existing product with the goal of solving real, user-empathized problems.
Another thing I learned was that inspiration is something not talked about and appreciated enough. Actually, I first thought of this solution after looking at a case study done by growth.design titled “Amber Alerts: 5 UX Improvements That Could Save Lives” where they did a total revamp of the IOS Amber Alert notification. New developments are always made using existing tools.
And if there’s one message I can takeaway from this and send it to my past self, I would say, “Don’t be afraid to be inspired“.