Know your guest
Hospitality is central to restaurants, so lacking those features can be a nonstarter for sales. We believe restaurants will increase their level of hospitality if Yelp provides robust guest details.
Role
Product designer
Timeline
3 months
Goals
Inform to improve hospitality
Provide hosts with details about their guests, when they most need it.
Center workflow efficiency
Reducing the number of clicks to complete an action is key for hosts’ workflows.
The experience
I designed the experience in three stages. This allowed our team to ship and then test results between each release.
Search for guests
Autofill guest phone number as host adds them to the waitlist.
Surfacing guest details
For the v2 experience, I designed how guest details are surfaced to hosts and the corresponding editing interactions.
Download Guest Directory
For the v3 experience, I designed a directory of guest details, allowing owners to analyze data for marketing campaigns.
Process
1) Reviewed business needs
Guest details is a required feature from a customer POV -> P0 urgency on the team
2) Initial user conversations
Informed the mental model powering the design + what info to show hosts & when.
3) Scoping with PM & eng
Used the research to draw out a vision for this product & used this to scope the work.
4) Design & prototype
Designed, prototyped, and speced out the logic of this experience.
5) Showed prototypes to users
Finalized the logic by reviewing prototypes with key users.
6) Finalizing & handoff
Documented newly-created components & wrote out the details of implementation.
Business & user needs
A business need identified the problem area, and user needs informed how to tackle and design the solution.
Business considerations
The team reviewed product feedback: Not having guest details was a frequent non-starter for customers when considering joining Yelp. This feedback identified a major need.
User conversations
Created a discussion guide and led interviews with owners and hosts. This informed what guest details hosts want to see & when + how to display these details in a way that matched their mental models.
Scope of project
I worked with my PM to scope the work to maximize the cost/benefit tradeoffs. This stage gave constraints & boundaries to work within.
Immersion
Understand the business
By this stage, I understood the business need to increase sales via introducing this new feature.
Understand the hosts (users)
I additionally went to restaurants to see hosts in action and talked with them about their needs.
Designing & prototyping
From the previous steps, I had immersed myself in the business & user needs. This allowed me to now make informed design decisions. But, because this experience was a major lift, I needed to further derisk it by creating a prototype to validate further.
Refined the designs
The designs needed to be ready to show to our users for testing, so they needed to feel as real as the final product would, despite being limited due to prototyping constraints.
Intense saving logic
Explored various logics for saving a guest's detailed. Took detailed notes for presentations & specs.
User testing with prototypes
Presented prototypes to restaurant managers for feedback. Most importantly, this informed our saving logic choices.
Derisked critical open questions
With competitive analysis
Compared our designs to our competitors to ensure that we weren't missing major concepts that our competitors already had.
With user testing
Shared prototypes with our users for feedback in moderated sessions. Getting feedback early further derisked our decisions.
Refinement & engineering handoff
Now that I had a derisked direction and a base-line of designs, I refined the designs further by designing and contributing new components back to our designs system. I also detailed specs for handoff to our eng team.
New and rethought components
Updated components to better utilize limited vertical space and introduced brand new components
Details that work for users
Leveraged competitive analysis, Yelp's component library, and user interviews to optimize interactions to meet hosts' needs
