Beli is a mobile app revolutionizing restaurant culture that allows users to track, share, and discover the best restaurants in their area. Upon using it for over a year and sharing the app with peers in the NYC area, opportunity areas for better app experiences began to emerge into my conversations with other Beli users. In this case study, I dive deeper into specific problem areas and tackle one of them with a complete prototyped solution.
User Researcher and User Experience Designer
Jun. 2024 - Jul. 2024
Keeping track of restaurants can be overwhelming, especially in cities with infinitely many eateries like New York. The Beli app today is an efficient way for foodies to record, recommend, and discover new places to eat. It also suggests new places based on past rankings of visited restaurants by the user, but these rankings are often met with controversy and confusion.
On top of using Beli for restaurant record-keeping, there are other platforms that users commonly use, such as Google Maps, Yelp, and even the traditional Notes app. These platforms offer features to create restaurant reviews, keep track of visited places, give them scores, and more. However, none of these platforms provide the seamless restaurant discovery and cuisine-based ranking features I decided to tackle on Beli to fully meet potential users' needs.
Many digital record-keeping tools today have unique functionalities, but it would be nice to have one place for our entire restaurant-visiting experiences...
How might we create a tool that helps foodies enjoy restaurant discovery, record-keeping, and sharing more efficiently?
People want to discover restaurants and keep a record of those they have been to on Beli, but they can’t do that well because:
flattened dining experiences
Beli asks users to compare new dining experiences with their highest-rated restaurant, which can be different in context (e.g., a vacation spot versus a regular work dinner). This uniform rating approach flattens diverse dining experiences. For example, users feel it’s unfair to rank a food truck against a fine dining establishment.
inconsistent user engagement
There is a level of friction when ranking that is not ideal for building a sticky product. Every time users go to a restaurant, they have to remember to put in an entry afterwards. This can lead to recency and proximity bias.
fragmented restaurant discovery
Users currently rely on a disjointed approach to explore and manage restaurants, hopping between social media, their Notes app, and Google Maps. This fragmentation creates limited discovery potential.
key insights
Foodies struggle to keep everything in one place.
They’re getting restaurant recs from TikTok and Instagram reels, saving where these places in Google Maps and their Notes app, recording them in Beli once they’ve tried them, and share using plain old text messages.
After recruiting some peers to help brainstorm and hundreds of sticky notes later, we identified two main opportunity areas for Beli’s app:
how might we foster a broader community where users can discover trustworthy accounts and find new restaurants?
how might we make Beli's rating system more adaptable to users' diverse dining experiences?
My fellow brainstormers and I narrowed down our ideas for solutions by feasibility and impact. After ending up with three features, I drew some initial flows. Each flow’s goal was to show how a user might access a feature and how they visit a restaurant, from the moment they discover it to after they log it into Beli.
curated explore pages.
This feature replaces the "Your Lists" tab on the Navigation bar with an "Explore" page that takes them to a curated feed of slideshow-style posts such as "Top 10 Ice Cream Places" (which is already featured on the app) and photos other accounts have posted in eateries the user has not tried yet. The design mimics a standard social media "explore page," with both proximity to other users and dining preferences coming into play for the curation of the feed.
This tackles the opportunity area "how might we foster a broader community where users can discover trustworthy accounts and find new restaurants?". By implementing an entire hub dedicated to discovering new restaurants and fellow Beli users, an entirely new entry point for usability is born. It opens up the community for a user who perhaps does not have as many foodie friends and may feel more limited using the app and increases the connections between users beyond just real-life friends. This could also be a playground for those who maybe do not entirely trust Beli's native "Top 10" lists, and get their recommendations from TikTok and NYTimes influencers. Here on the Explore Page, they can discover accounts they find have similar preferences as they do, instead of exposure on their feed to people they follow or just friends of friends.
weighted ranking system and reminder.
This feature allows users to customize what criteria they want to emphasize based on what they believe is critical to consider in their review. Default weights would be presented to the user, but they can assign weights to different factors relevant to that context, creating a ranking system that reflects their individual preferences. This mockup also increases visibility of the labels in the "Add label" section, as it may be more helpful for Beli to present them with more "fair" competition. For example, a user who tags a place as "quick take-out" can easily do so when they see it right when they rank it. Then, Beli knows to compare it to other "quick take-out" places.
This tackles the opportunity area "make Beli's rating system more adaptable to users' diverse dining experiences?". Another layer of personalization is added to the ranking flow, and users can feel more confident they made an accurate assessment between restaurants upon specifying what they believe is important to consider at that specific place.
After assessing each of the features we came up with, I decided to go with curated explore pages since it seemed the most feasible and had the greatest impact. In following through with this solution, I was directly tackling the goal Beli has to help users discover new restaurants, which I found in my user interviews had the most pain points or lack of use.
curated feed home view.
How do we expose users to Beli's community outside of their own friends?
How do we build trust in featured "Top 10" lists such as those curated by Beli?
How do we keep users engaged in connecting with others than just by being friends?
A finalized prototype is shown below with visuals of how users can interact with the app.
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