Designing Yelp’s first “Year in Review”: Sharing personalized data on users’ contributions

Intro

As a company and product that is known for its reviews, our user-generated content is our bread and butter, and is what makes people come back to Yelp for inspiration on where to eat, where to go, and who to hire. To celebrate our users for their contributions, in January 2022 we rolled out Yelp’s very first yearly impact summary, “Your Year on Yelp.”We wanted to show our users their impact on Yelp at the end of the year in a meaningful way, which posed an interesting design problem for us to tackle.

Challenges & objectives

What was pivotal for this project was the scalability of the feature. We wanted the recap to capture the nuances of each piece of unique content generated from all users, whether throughout the course of 2021 a user only answered a couple of survey questions, or shared tons of photos and reviews. In other words, we wanted to make sure that the “Your Year on Yelp” recap looked and felt enticing and inspiring, whether someone was a rookie contributor or a seasoned Yelp Elite.

After having a few brainstorming sessions and discussions with stakeholders and the cross-functional team, we were able to align on some core principles:

• Scalability — Make it meaningful for all types of contributors (from light to power users)
• Delightfulness — Make it joyful to read through, make our users feel delighted, rewarded, and acknowledged
• Personability — Make it about them, not us. When users see this feature, we want them to feel like it is designed specifically for them

As we were aligning on the core principles and our true project goal, there were also a lot of discussions happening with the engineering team to learn what data points were accessible to us. We continued to sync with our engineering team weekly to catch up on what was feasible at the moment or what was better to leave for future iterations. Our engineering partners also shared numerous creative ideas for the design team to explore: “Hey, it looks like X data is available for us, so we could potentially create a Y story based on that number and Z many users will have this data available.” Every time they shared their ideas with us, it was music to our ears!

Ideations and evolutions

Based on those discussions, we decided to take a modular approach to this project. I started creating modules based on the data we had available to help build a unique experience for each user. For the delight and visual impact, we also integrated a lot of visual elements like illustrations and bold typography:

After sharing the initial iterations with our stakeholders, we received insightful feedback, for example,”We love the visual and modularity, but it’s not clear what the numbers actually mean.” This was an eye-opening moment for us as we realized we needed to give more love to the copy and storytelling on the modules, rather than primarily focusing on each module’s visuals.

Hence, we decided to collaborate with the product marketing team and creative copy team to ideate how to craft a cohesive story around those modules. After further ideating in this direction, we landed on an overarching theme that tied all those modules together — ”You helped make your city a better place this year.”

To illustrate a few examples of how this messaging got carried out through different modules, instead of saying “X many business owners responded to your reviews,” we decided to say “You supported and helped local businesses” to make the statistic more meaningful.

Also, instead of saying “X questions answered for [business name],” we decided to say, “People got to know more about X businesses.”

We also said, “You’re clearly a Sushi Lover and your X reviews helped others like you,” instead of simply stating how many reviews the user wrote in a specific category. This built a more compelling story around the type of contributor the user is.

Learnings

It was hard to summarize these key takeaways since I learned a lot working on this project. That said, the bigger project it is the more perspectives it will get, including conflicting ideas and feedback at times. In reflection, staying open really helped me ground myself throughout the design process. If I were to be married to one idea too early, I would have missed out on opportunities to take the design to where it is now.

I cannot emphasize enough how pivotal it was to share designs early with the stakeholders. Incorporating feedback from multiple stakeholders is not always easy, but feeling comfortable sharing designs to make critical early decisions was very important.

Lastly, engineers are our best friends. I was personally super impressed by how creative our engineering team was throughout the process — especially since this project was constrained by the data we had available. When they say something is not feasible, ask them what other things are possible. Obviously, sometimes designers need to fight for what is really crucial to get done, and our product partners always help us push those ideas, but trusting them as creative partners really helped craft this project to where it is now. I am very thankful for the quality collaboration that we had.

Special shoutout to:

Design Manager: Clara MacDonell
Product Manager: Kristine Oak
Engineering Manager: Derek Quach
Engineers: Jack Guy, Yves Li, Nathan Chica, Gaurav Patil and many more
Product Marketing: Michelle McPherson, John Huang
Animation: Patrick Riggs