Yelp
Yelp:
Two Week Case Study
People use Yelp to find all sorts of things—especially when they’re on vacation and in an unfamiliar place. In this case study Yelp wanted to expand their offerings to be the go to place for travelers planning their trips. They wanted to introduce a feature that allowed users to create itineraries for their travels, as well as keep a record of their actual experiences.
Our task was to conceptualize and integrate this feature into the existing Yelp mobile app interface in a two week project sprint. As the project manager of a two person group, I was also tasked with creating a project plan and research document to use as a resource throughout the design process.
Problem:
People use Yelp all the time but not to actually plan and curate their vacations. We needed to find a way to figure out what is most important to people when they travel and how to incorporate that into the design of this new feature.
Task:
- Design a flow for users to create itineraries with designated locations/services.
- Design a flow for users to “record” all the experiences of their trip.
My Role:
- Designing high fidelity wireframes
- Building prototype
- Competitive and Comparative Research
- Development of Research Report
- Design of Technical Specifications Document
Research:
General Survey:
We conducted a survey to learn more about people's travel habits and preferences. From our survey we were able to identify a few interesting data sets that told us more about how our prospective users were traveling below:
User Interviews:
We interviewed users about their travel habits, which travel tools they used the most, along with their pains, pleasures, behaviors, and context of use.
Take Aways:
Comparative Feature Flows:
As part of our research we recognized that Yelp did not offer a list feature within their mobile app. We decided to take a look at some of their competitors to see if they offered this feature and what the user flow process entailed when creating a list and adding a place of interest to that list.
Synthesis:
Through our research we discovered that there are two types of users; highly organized users with a very detailed itinerary, and the "go with the flow" users who liked to be more spontaneous while they travel. We realized that we had to create a feature that could simultaneously appeal to both user types without sacrificing functionality on either side.
We took the needs, pains, and pleasures of our interview subjects and created two personas to keep the user's needs in mind while creating our designs.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Design:
Sketches:
Original Yelp Opening Page New Yelp Opening Page
Original Yelp Business Page New Yelp Business Page
Scheduled Itinerary Page Design:
This page shows different businesses or areas of interest that users have added to their itinerary; and allows them to manage their schedules in an easily digestible timeline. They can identify gaps in their trip to better manage their schedules. Keeping the two different use cases in mind, we added the ability for the user to switch between a scheduled itinerary and an unscheduled list of places of interest.
User Flows:
This is an example of a flow where a user is searching for a restaurant in London and would like to add that restaurant to their list for their trip. The user successfully adds the restaurant to their selected trip and then navigates to the list of both scheduled and unscheduled items in order to add that restaurant to a specific time on their itinerary.
