Stephanie Coloma
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read
3rd UXDI project

As you may know Yelp is the go-to place for reviews of restaurants, businesses, and various services. My second UXDI project is to help Yelp increase user engagement by appealing to travelers.The project brief was to expand their services by integrating an itinerary feature, as well as the ability to record these experiences with friends and family.

For this project, I was teamed up with two other General Assembly students.

Yelp Group Presentation

I. RESEARCH:

We started our project research with an empathy map to help us to have an idea of what the user perspective is.

Yelp Customer’s Perspective

II. Competitive & Comparative Analysis:

As a team we started looking to other travel companies to understand the landscape of current apps such as Trip Advisor, Expedia, and Priceline.

We compared the feature and and element analysis of these apps and after testing them, we realized that Yelp stands out in appealing to social media users. Yelp has check-in feature, post and share with its in-built camera function and upcoming events. However, Yelp has many features that can appeal to travelers, but it is only well known for reviewing restaurants.

The similarities that they share are reviews, and sharing photos of other business.

As we finished with our competitive and comparative analysis, we’ll move on to user interviews.

III. SCREEN SURVEYS AND USER INTERVIEWS

To decide who our target user is for an interview, we build a screener survey through Google Forms. We posted online through Slack, on social media and snowball process. Finally, we screened 23 people, from our screener we selected smart phone users, using or knowing traveling apps, social media users and users who had travel in the past 6 months. Now that we found out who our target user is, we then reached out to those who qualified and continued with in-depth user interviews. We interviewed 9 different users, in person and by phone. It took us 4 days of this interview process and from them we learned the following quotes.

“My smartphone is my lifeline, I try to have it everywhere while I travel.”

“I tend to add things to my plans as necessary.”

“I need to plan ahead of time or else I’ll get stressed!”

User Interview

IV. SYNTHESIZE RESEARCH

Our takeaway from these quotes were:

*Phone is with them everywhere — decision making and documenting moments happen in real time.

*People would rather solve problems as they encounter them, users would rather try restaurants as they discover them.

*Planning in advance is delegated to the type A brain, because no one else finds joy in it.

Using both perspectives of the business and the user goals we wanted to identify common trends and general topics that were mentioned across user experiences.

Using affinity mapping we targeted 3 major fields of focus — planning, review readers, sharing.

33% of users enjoy planning trips. We want to know why the number is so low. We know from our research that planning is difficult, it is stressful, and plans can’t really be set in stone. Plans change and sometimes life gets in the way but it can be super frustrating when you spend all your time in advance planning a trip.

All of our users share their experiences in some way shape or form, whether its through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat but only 11% of user actually write reviews or post pictures on Yelp.

We concluded that users need an easier and more fun way to plan trips as well as an app that allows you to record and share those trips and experiences with other people

V. PERSONAS

Using the data we have collected and the information gained from user research we constructed personas that are our ideal candidates when using the Yelp app.

Ashlee was our primary persona, she is a young millennial, just out of college, and looking to celebrate a friend’s birthday with a group. Ashlee and her friends need to plan a night of fun while balancing the needs. Ashlee needs the ability to collaborate with her friends, share the adventure with her friends, all of this within one app that doesn’t require a 3rd party. She was created using the most common information in user research.

Primary Persona

Dennis is a freelance photographer and travels for leisure and for work, he is very data conscious when he travels abroad, he worries about going to tourist traps and would like an offline map. He doesn’t share on social media that much, but when he does it is to let his family know he is having a good time. He represents some other data we discovered in our interviews that our team though is very important.

Secondary Persona

After so much research we concluded the following problem statement:

“Unsure travelers need a way to have an adaptable itinerary because plans are ever changing.”

VI. FEATURE PRIORITIZATION

We began our design process by focusing on the most possible and probable features that would be used in Yelp travel. We discussed offline mapping as well as a reward/incentive feature but a planner option, sharing and social media aspect are our focal points

After feature prioritization, we began discussing key features and key screens we would need to create a simple, easy to use experience.

USER FLOW

VII. IDEATION

Our planner was going to include a social tab that allows you and your friends to up or down vote certain activities anyone added in the planner so they would automatically rank the most voted to the top as well as a way for you to directly message between everyone included to keep plans cohesive.

The flow was starting to get too complicated so we referred back to our MVP and problem statement to simplify and condense to our key screens for features.

We turned our sketches into a lo-fi mock-up in sketch so we can begin user testing our product with the InvisionApp. We iterated a new mock up after every few user tests we conducted.

TEAM SKETCHES

VIII. WIREFRAMING, PROTOTYPING, USER TESTING

The wireframes allowed us to address all the usability issues we found within our app small parts at a time. Users were experiencing confusion on our screen to create a new planner so we added a modal pop up to point users into the right direction.

We also heard from users that our add activity page was confusing because just a + button didn’t tell them what they could do at this point, so we added some words to hint them along.

VI. CURRENT PROTOTYPE

Our final prototype was built to demonstrate how Ashlee can add an activity to her plan. She will add a restaurant to her planner, and she will take a picture of her experience with the restaurant business and her friends.

The final prototype can be found here through InVision:

https://invis.io/K9CPLBTHX

or you can watch our project video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6qkAOAxjMo

X. NEXT STEPS

We want to start implementing and testing the ranking system for activities in your planner based on up votes and down votes. We also want users to be able to hit an option between two tasks on their planner that will allow them to get directions from one activity to the next so they can be mindful of travel distance and time. Our interviews told us users are data conscious especially when overseas and sometimes without data so we would give them the ability to save maps offline so they are always able to use them.

We want to flesh out a two way rating system to rate reviewers to bring up the quality of Yelp reviews. User research told us a lot of people take these reviews into consideration before making a decision about where to go but sometimes they just aren’t trustworthy. Our overall goal here is to improve Yelp’s user experience with a positive feedback loop. As more users leave quality reviews and pictures for destinations, more people will begin to utilize Yelp, leading to them leaving better reviews and pictures, which in turn will increase Yelp’s user base and so on and so forth.

Stephanie Coloma

Written by

UX Designer & Soccer Mom

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