1. Initial Analysis

Before jumping into user research, the very first question was, what does this new service really mean? What’s the difference between this service and other existing ways people currently use? After did a little bit of research, I realized that each of the current information sources people use to find restaurants has it’s own “mechanism of trust”. And the mechanism consists of two parts: the origin of data and the type of data.

2. Exploratory Research

I interviewed 10 participants between 20–40, all of them are Yelp or google users. Participants were asked to arrange the cards with information sources to show how frequently they use and how much they trust each of them. The 3 major research questions are:

• How and when do people use each information source to find restaurants?
• What do people trust about each information source?
• How do people recommend restaurants to their social circle?

A participant showing me the marks she put on google map

I used a set of cards to prompt participants' thoughts.

1. People Trust Their Social Circle!

Detailed Insights

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2. Other Qualities Matter

Besides credibility, agility and data efficiency are two other qualities that users expect to see from the information sources.

• Agility: how widely an information source applies to various user scenarios. e.g. users will not text their friends for recommendations when they happen to be an unfamiliar neighborhood.
• Data efficiency: how much data is needed for one to trust an information source. e.g. a participant said that he barely goes to restaurants with fewer than 50 comments on Yelp but only one positive comment from his friend with make him go.

2. Personas

I also identified 3 types of potential users of my service, they are foodie, foodie's friend, and ethnic food expert. What interested me was, all international people I interviewed expressed that they are knowledgeable about food from their hometown but extremely ignorant about some other ethnic food, especially those they don't see much in their home country. I use the ethnic food expert persona to represent this user group. From a content generation and consumption perspective, these 3 groups of users are located at different spots.

Detailed Insights

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1. Information Architecture

The refinement process involved multiple rounds of back and forth between the design of the information architecture and paper prototype.

2. Wireframes

Based on the revised information architecture, I developed the following wireframes. Several rounds of iterations were taken to test out different layouts and design details.

User Flow 1:
Explore friends' lists

User Flow 2:
Search restaurants nearby, check out details of a restaurant and go.

User Flow 3:
Add a restaurant to My Lists.