Yelp: Let’s Travel Together.
For our second class project at General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive, we divided into teams of three to tackle our first collaborative assignment. We were instructed to integrate a given feature into an existing application, an initiative crafted specifically to teach us how to construct high-level personas, learn feature prioritization methods, sketch app basics, prototype in InVision, and harness our skills in a team setting. My team — Dev, Stephanie and I — were stoked to receive our brief because our client was Yelp!
The Ask
Upon a cursory glance at the Yelp app, I was naturally overwhelmed by its already existing features. That’s sort of the catch-22; like a Swiss Army knife, Yelp dabbles in countless features but doesn’t necessarily master any one of them. Our goal was to really disrupt the travel space, with Yelp serving as a primary contender when planning vacations and trips. We needed to find a way for users to not only create itineraries for upcoming trips, but to also record their experiences right on the app itself.
User Research
We started our journey with empathy mapping, a process that essentially puts ourselves in a typical Yelper’s shoes as he or she navigates the app. We pinpointed the user “pains,” including technological frustrations and even “featuritis,” a colloquial disease we deem to be rooted in a heavily feature-dominated interface. We also examined the user “gains,” which primarily consisted of instant access to businesses, easy communication, and exclusive offerings.

Next, we analyzed our digital competitors in the travel app market. After all, our goal was to implement an itinerary feature, so we looked to our travel competitors : TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Priceline.com. Yelp certainly held its own when it came to in-depth feature analysis, and was particularly strong in the social media aspect as well. People gravitate toward Yelp’s flagship features, like its photos and check-ins. Reported weaknesses included some redundancy in features, as well as a button-overload. Even the profile page takes about 3 clicks to access.
While we could have spent weeks dedicated to analyzing Yelp on its own, we wanted to hear from real users to tell us about their respective experiences. We conducted a screener survey to narrow down a few qualified participants for an in-depth user interview. Inevitably we selected nine target participants, each avid smartphone users, relatively loyal travel apps users, and vacationers within the past year.

After digesting insightful perspectives about travel apps and Yelp, my team began affinity mapping, a process curated to identify common trends and general shared topics mentioned in efforts to attack pain and gain points head-on. Planning, sharing, and reviewing were the three most common themes.

Only 33% of users claimed that they actually enjoyed planning vacations. Based on our research, planning is dismissed as “too difficult” and “too stressful,” and requires a certain personality type to take the demanding initiative to execute plan-making.
Additionally, we noted that all of our users digitally shared (publicly posted) their experiences in some way shape or form, either through Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. However, only 11% of our user shared pictures or reviewed through the Yelp app.
With our user interviews complete, we concluded that users need a way to plan trips in a fun, relaxed, and easy-to-use app that allows Yelpers to record and share trips with peers.
Personas
Using the data we’ve collected, our team got straight to constructing personas, or contrived illustrations that best represent our ideal Yelpers. Thus, we created Ashlee Davis: a young gluten-free, liberal arts college graduate, looking to celebrate a late-night birthday party with her group of friends. She needs an all-inclusive app that enables her to collaborate with friends on selecting bars and bites, as well as a robust sharing feature to document the fun.

The Problem
The take-away statement: “Unsure travelers need a way to have an adaptable itinerary because plans are ever-changing.” Most users like to plan on-the-go, keeping adventures fluid and flexible, so it’d be best that they have an adaptable planner that can change as quickly as their plans do.
Design + Testing
We began our design process with feature prioritization. Our users expressed incredible ideas for better travel experiences, however, implementing every feature into an already complex application is nearly impossible. We decided on two key additions: creating an itinerary/planner and improving the sharing/social media aspects.
With a general idea of tangible next steps, we began our basic sketches and user flows that would allow for the best user experience possible. We selected key screens that would be integral to have in a travel-emphasized app, which came to include a revamped profile page, a planner/activity page, and a new camera/memory collection page. Individually, we sketched rudimentary designs and uploaded them into the Marvel app to begin early user testing.
Ideation + Iteration
From our sketches, we designed wireframes based on feedback we received from usability testing. Many of our early designs consisted of floating text boxes and slide-out menu bars. Users who tested the app initially struggled with the unfamiliar style and its incongruence with the current Yelp layout. For the next iterations, we were sure to give it a more typical Yelp feel.
With some user testing on the paper prototype behind us, we made appropriate changes and then moved on to wireframes.
We turned to our beloved InVision app, which allows us to upload designs and transform them into functional prototypes. During our prototyping phase, there were recurrent areas of difficulty for users who tested the app, one being the inability to efficiently add trips to the itinerary. In the early iterations, the ‘add a trip’ and ‘add an activity’ pages were too similar. Without color and description of what page they were on, users believed that they were stuck in a loop. In the next iteration, we corrected the problems by incorporating a modal pop-up to “create a planner,” as well as a clear “add an activity” button. After these changes, users created planners with much more ease.

Another major area of confusion during testing period was evident in the camera feature, which first appeared as a circular button with a check mark inside, which disoriented users at first. In our latest iteration (after several trials and errors) we decided to place a ‘send’ button across the bottom of the screen, which users found to be extremely navigable.
Usability testing was extremely valuable to my team and me, for we became highly attentive to minor as well as major overlooked issues within our application. We took the suggestions to heart in order to create a seamless user experience. We knew going into this project that Yelp could be very complicated, but we were deeply dedicated to personalizing Yelp and making it a more straightforward and collaborative experience.

Next Steps
It became abundantly clear that people generally disliked planning trips quite early in our process; unfortunately, while we weren’t able to tackle this insight in a timely manner for our presentation, we agreed that it is a key theme that must not be ignored. We came up with the idea for a rating/ranking system for activities in your planner based on “up votes” and “down votes.” As activities would reach the top of the list, people would recognize its popularity; likewise, if activities fall to the bottom of the list, they could be eliminated accordingly.