RASHI GUPTA

Role:

UX Researcher, UX Designer,  Content Strategist

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Scope:

Design Improvements for Yelp's Home Screen and Search Screen

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Tools:

Balsamiq

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USER PERSONA

1. Casual Users - These are the users who do not frequently use Yelp. They often use word of mouth recommendations.

2. Serious Users - These are the users who frequently use Yelp to check details about a business, reviews, photos, other information. 

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I will be using "Serious Users" as my user persona to improve the design on Yelp since these are the users who are concerned about finding details about the business on Yelp and would want to quickly find what they want.

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PROBLEM/PAIN-POINTS

1. UX is a problem : The "Nearby" Home Screen in Yelp is the first one you land on when you open the app. I feel that the current version of this important screen is not as useful as it can be. A home screen should be able to make an immediate impact on the user and enable them to get to what they are looking for. I noticed that:

   • I end up never using the categories listed except "Restaurants". After doing some user research, I realized that a lot of other users are facing the same challenges. Most users end up using the search feature to get the information they need.

   • The information below the categories seems to be random and is of no immediate use to the user. It may be a section that Yelp uses to monetize its services, however, I feel that the space can be better utilized in another way and still be monetized.

2. The Search feature in Yelp is not intuitive.

   • If the user has searched restaurants in the Home Page, it leads to this Search Page showing Map of your location and restaurants located near your location. ​

     • The map occupies more than half of the screen real estate depending on what your last search was. This is unnecessary as the user cannot immediately get any information about the businesses here.

     • The businesses are listed in no specific order and there are not enough filters for the users to quickly filter the restaurants that they are interested in.

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PROCESS:

Any kind of user experience design starts with user research.  I did the user research myself as I use the Yelp app quite frequently. I also spoke with a few friends to get another user's insight. I quickly checked with them on a few things  - how did they look for restaurants or businesses, did they feel the need for any new filters, did the home screen add any value to their entire experience on yelp etc. Once I had enough data points, I did some white-boarding of my process and came up with a paper prototype of the improvements needed in yelp.

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Paper Prototype:

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SOLUTION:

1. Increasing Home screen Intuitiveness as shown in the Yelp Home Page To-Be Mock up

• Search bar is more personal - Content inside the Search bar is "What are you looking for?" instead of just "Search".

• Categories are listed as Drop-down menu. This saves screen real estate.

• Remove the current randomly listed items and provide a list of more relevant and filtered list of items like "Top restaurants near you". Each of these will be a horizontally scrollable list of businesses. Some of these can be sponsored items (monetization). Each tile shows the primary image thumbnail of the business with its average rating & distance from the user's location. The sponsored tiles also visually indicate that they are sponsored.

• Remove the bottom Menu Bar. The menu bar at the bottom of the screens may provide better accessibility, but seems irrelevant as "Nearby" is the Home screen. This Home screen already has a search bar at the top, so a separate search icon in the menu bar is not needed. (Both the search bar and icon take the user to the same screen). The new account overlay menu can hold the rest of the items and everything else under "More". This account call to action (CTA) is placed next to the search bar in the proposed redesign.​

  2.   Increasing Search Page intuitiveness and making it easier for the user to find businesses using filters.

• Reduce the Map size to only occupy half of the search results screen 

  • there is more real estate available to list the businesses​

  • the user can see the map and identify the pinned businesses below in the list

• Add more filters like "Average Customer Reviews" (for the user to list restaurants based on ratings and reviews), "Closest to Me" (for the user to list restaurants by distance), "Cuisine" (for the user to choose which cuisine he/she wants to have, this filter is only applicable for Restaurants Category), 

• Change the current "Open Now" filter to "Open..." . If the user is looking for businesses at 2:45 pm and a listed business is closed by 3:00 pm, this filter is not of much help. The users are really looking for businesses open until the time they reach there and be able to be attended to. So instead of having an Open Now filter it is important to give the ability to the user to directly choose the time by when the businesses will be open.

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