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Yelp!

A conceptual design challenge

Researching Yelp Users

To confirm if there was a real interest in this feature, we conducted our initial user interviews with 8 users ranging from 25-50. Our users included current yelp users, foodies, and frequent travelers. During this phase, our main goals were to:

  1. Understand user habits around travel itinerary creation (platform, approach, solo vs communal planning)

  2. Identify the extent to which food impacts the travel planning process

Our Findings

When talking with our users, we found that Users care most about reliable recommendations, accurate restaurant information, and unique experiences.

Who Are We Up Against?

By comparing Yelp’s primary features against their biggest competitors in the industry, we found that there was an opportunity for Yelp to gain an advantage by building out a feature that allows users to plan trips in the Yelp app.

The Problem: Travelers need a way to create flexible, personalized trip itineraries centered around food using reviews and recommendations so that they can maximize their travel days with a combination of preplanned activities and unique, spontaneous experiences.

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The Opportunity: Yelp can use AI to expand their business offerings and compete more in the travel industry by creating travel itineraries for users based on their interests and Yelp’s robust data around popular locations. This is based on data from a competitive analysis of Yelp’s competitors as well as user interviews identifying a desire for more personalized travel itineraries around cuisine.   

A New Challenge!

Say Hello To Yuna and Eddie!

To help us keep in mind exactly who would use a trip itinerary feature, we created two personas that represented two kinds of potential Yelp travel users: a solo traveler and a group traveler.

    • Uses Yelp and other social media sites (TikTok, Instagram) to get trip ideas and food recommendations 

    • Travels with his family, including his 5 younger siblings ranging from 10-16

    • Takes everyone’s opinions into account while planning

    • Chooses the activities first, and then sees what food options are nearby

    • Confusion around price points

    • Budgeting for large family

    • Hidden costs / fees that mess with the budget

    • Limited space in restaurants means inadequate space/table size to accommodate the whole family

    • Cost effective dining options for large families

    • Activities for multiple generations - parents, teens, kids

    • Proper price estimates on attractions to plan something within his parent’s budget

    • Completes extensive research on each place she visits, reading lots of reviews, watching other influencer’s content, and clicking through images

    • Tries to find the most “instagrammable” places to visit

    • Likes to explore the cities, so she frequents destinations that are within reasonable distance of public transportation

    • Meals for dietary restrictions are not highlighted on restaurant’s page

    • Lack of transparency with wait times

    • Lengthy and hard to find reservation requirements 

    • Aesthetically pleasing locations and food presentation to develop content.

    • Relevant reviews and ratings from people in her network

    • Immersion in a city’s unique culture and history through food.

Low and Mid -Fidelity Usability Testing

During our first round of testing, we gained a lot of insight into how we could improve both the usability and aesthetics of the feature in the next round of iteration. Based on those results we made some changes to our lo-fi prototype to account for these points of frustration. Our next move was to conduct a second round of usability testing, in which we found that:  

Overview 

We explored the opportunity to improve the Yelp user experience by modifying Yelp’s current toolset to offer an in-app a way for users to create itineraries and organize trips based on food. Our goals were to: 

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  • Design a tool that helps travelers plan a multi-destination tour.

  • Help travelers create an itinerary that connects multiple points of interest.

This case study is purely conceptual. Any work represented here is not associated with nor endorsed by Yelp!

On We Go To Hi-Fidelity

It was important that our new design could be seamlessly added to Yelp’s app without disrupting the experience for existing users. To ensure this, we made sure to follow Yelp’s pre-existing style guide, as well as taking special care to identify the sizing parameters, so we could make sure the new elements would be responsive across multiple different devices.
 

Visualizing The Experience

To fully explore how a Yelp itinerary feature would work, we decided to build out Yuna’s flow to showcase as many features of this tool as possible. In our initial lo-fi wireframes, we set out to establish a few key points of her flow. Those points included: Where she could access details for her trip, how her trip itinerary is displayed, and how she can add a new stop to her trip.

Deciding The MVP

After we identified buckets position in the industry, our next course of action was to conduct user interviews in order to understand users habits and preferences when it comes to exchanging and organizing contact information. Out of our 10 participants, we found 3 key trends. 

  1. Users value privacy and control over their information

  2. Users add keywords and notes to contacts so they can easily find them later

  3. Users want to locate and organize contacts quickly

Progress!

We conducted one last round of usability testing on the high fidelity prototype, using the results to create a roadmap to follow as we continue the development of this feature. Our two main goals going forward are to: Create a responsive design for Yelp’s desktop site and finalize the mobile onboarding flow for user testing.

Desktop Mockups - Iteration 1

Onboarding Mockups - Iteration 1

coming soon

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Reflection

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