The Challenge

In 2011 Google acquired Zagat as a way to quickly beef up restaurant reviews in it’s social network Google+. But for the next four years Google+ floundered. And other sources of local reviews were found. In the meantime competitors in the restaurant search space developed robust offerings and took the market. By 2015 users saw the Zagat brand as irrelevant and found it’s outdated iOS app unusable.

In the summer of 2015 Google made the choice to turn this around. The company decided to reinvest in Zagat, redesign the brand identity, and transform it into a competitive local search product. The centerpiece of this transformation was a new iOS app, rebuilt, redesigned, and not beholden to anything that had come before.

My Role

I led experience strategy and design for the new Zagat iOS app for six months in 2015. I was brought onto the project in it’s earliest stage as a consultant and charged with the mission of aligning stakeholders around the core strategy. This meant synthesiszing existing research about local search, delivering a set of product recommendations, and running a Google-ventures-style design sprint with Product and Engineering teams. I was then contracted to manage a UX and visual designer and work with them to deliver the final design.

Approach: Optimize for Frequency of Use

I began the project by surveying usage logs for search and filter features in the existing app. The new UI would emphasize features according to the frequency of use of these features.

Search: Waging a war on typing

We identified through existing research that typing is a major pain point in mobile search. So we designed the core search functionality to avoid typing as much as possible.

The Happiest Flow
The ideal search flow requires no typing. The home screen suggests frequent searches based on time-of-day and location. In a single tap users may perform these searches and view the results on a map. The most frequently used cuisine filters are then presented as buttons at the top of the map view. The whole flow allows users to access the most frequently searches and filters in two taps.

The Second Happiest Flow
Some users displayed reticence at initiating a search from the home screen. They usually preferred to start on the search screen. In this flow, we used the search screen to present the most frequently performed searches, arranged by popularity for the user's current location.

The Third Happiest Flow
For users who insist on typing into the search bar, we designed a set of autosuggest menus to help them avoid having to type their full search.

Lists
Zagat lists are a much loved and unique aspect of the brand's offering. They were included as a navigation item on the tab bar.

Saved
A core group of users expressed a need for some personalization. These users also displayed a behavior of browsing and bookmarking places. The Saved feature allows users to bookmark both places and lists.

The Place Detail
The place detail page was designed to build confidence about choosing a restaurant by mixing several kinds of information. As a user scroll she is alternately presented photos, ratings, expert reviews, and UGC reviews.