Jean Kim

 Design Assessment - Blizzard

With almost every restaurant in California closed for seating at the moment due to the "Safer at Home Act”, many people are relying on delivery apps to order their meals throughout the day. For the past few weeks I have been using apps like Uber Eats, Door Dash, and other food delivery mobile apps more often than usual. For this design assessment, I chose to analyze and redesign one of my most used apps, Yelp. With the in-restaurant experience gone for the moment, an app like Yelp begins to lose some of their users who’s purpose was to search and find reviews regarding a restaurant experience.

What is Yelp during a time like this?

Yelp is a local-search service powered by crowd-sourced review forum, as well as an online reservation, delivery, and take out service. In major metropolitan areas where there is an abundance of small local businesses, a tool like Yelp is very helpful in helping users make decisions for where to eat, what to do, and discovering other nearby services. With 72% of yelp searches done through a mobile device, the app utilizes the phone’s geolocation feature in a way where users can easily see the services in their vicinity. The rating system of Yelp has also become a powerful tool for businesses to increase visibility and attract new customers with feedback from “real customers”. However, most of the reviews on Yelp are related to not just the quality of food but it encompasses the entire restaurant experience, from the moment the user steps foot into the restaurant to the moment they pull their car out of the parking lot. Due to the “Safer At Home Act” in the state of California, all in-restaurant experiences have been banned and thus delivery and take-out services have become the only way restaurants have been providing food to customers. But aside from the restaurant ratings and reviews, Yelp also provides a delivery service that integrates third party services such as GrubHub and Delivery.com in order to fulfill user’s deliveries.

User Research

Yelp is successful in providing users an easy way to pick and choose a restaurant to go for an in-restaurant experience. The delivery feature of Yelp was not initially the main purpose of the app and was added as a feature in early 2018. There are many inconsistencies within the app for users who want to open Yelp for the purpose of ordering delivery or take out. Below are screenshots and analysis of some screens I took with the lens of a user who opened Yelp to order Thai food as well as a journey map of a Yelp user navigating through the app to place a delivery order.

After analyzing the user’s journey and Yelp’s interface, I came up with a couple major pain points that was relating to the broken experience.

Painpoint 1: Yelp was not designed for the delivery ordering user in mind, so information displayed is inconsistent and all over the place, making it difficult for a user to quickly find what they need.

Painpoint 2: The search for restaurants that offer delivery is broken into too many different selections. Through a banner CTA, two filter options, and a global tab option, there is no clear designation for where the user needs to go in order to order delivery.

In order to better address pain point 1, I created user personas of a traditional Yelp user and a user who uses delivery apps. The goal being to create a better experience that caters to both personas.

The Redesign

The delivery tab at the bottom of the Yelp app was not being utilized for very much, so it was the perfect location for where all delivery related actions should be. The search tab at the bottom will still be used for Yelp’s primary review and rating search, so the Delivery section will have its own search functionality within the tab. Also within each restaurant page, if they offer delivery or takeout, then the page will have the reviews and delivery functionality in two separate tabs. That way the reviews can still be accessible while the user is selecting their order in case they want to see what the Yelp community has to say. And on the flip side, if a user is looking at reviews for an in-restaurant experience, they can view the full menu on the tab rather than having to sift through uploaded photos of the menu.

Something that was missing from Yelp was reviews and ratings for the delivery experience of the restaurant. The rating system on Yelp for restaurant experiences is measure with stars, so the new rating system I designed is with Plates. Users can give up to 5 plates to a restaurant depending on their satisfaction with their delivery experience.

With the redesign, the search of reviews and ordering delivery features are of equal importance, so the reviews for the two experiences need to be distinguished. A user’s in-restaurant experience cannot tell much about how their delivery experience will be and vice versa, so the ratings that are shown for search results in the Delivery tab should show both in-restaurant ratings and delivery ratings.

Next steps and learnings

The next steps for the redesign would be to do user testing and gather feedback on whether the delivery feature was gaining more traction or not. Creating a stronger experience for the delivery ordering user can bring a new audience to Yelp who may have a shifted perception of Yelp being a delivery app more so than a restaurant experience reviewing forum. This may not be what Yelp’s goals as a company may lie, but could also positively impact them by bringing in more consumers and providing a change to the now 16 year old app.

One of the biggest learnings while doing this design assessment has been realizing how much mobile applications have changed the culture of the entire restaurant industry. It can create new business opportunities for business owners, new methods of discovery for consumers, and provide ways for businesses to still reach their customers even during a global pandemic.