Restaurant Review Insights

Responsibilities

UX Design Intern @ Dax Designers

Tools

Octoparse, Voyant, Excel, SurveyMonkey, Figma

Timeline

3 months

Team

Diana (Self), Dermina, Mariya, Christina

An app that compiles and aggregates data from online review platforms to help users make informed decisions regarding restaurants.

I completed this project during a 4-month internship with a data experience-centric startup, Dax Designers. The goal of this project was to effectively apply UX methodologies to a dashboard that reimagines the fabric of online review platforms. I worked in a close-knit team with a senior UX designer and UX research interns.

The landscape of reviews

Review platforms are where users go to read informed opinions on businesses. Whether it’s a restaurant owner wanting to know what customers have to say, or potential customers seeking other customer opinions, review platforms serve a wide audience. As these platforms continue to grow and more reviews are aggregated, issues can arise.

Re-thinking review platforms

Review platforms are designed to display a restaurant's overall score at the forefront for users to examine. However, this data is only surface-level information. Users must read reviews for more in-depth insight.

One recent negative review can sit on the surface of a site for weeks and have a lot of weight on a user, but reading hundreds of reviews on a single restaurant is impractical. And every day, fake reviews become an increasing concern for business owners and customers alike. We asked ourselves…

"How can we transform review platforms so users can efficiently access well-rounded information on restaurants?"

Goal

Design a review insights app that allows users to make informed decisions on restaurants.

Our goal is to help users easily identify why a restaurant has received its overall rating, without having to read hundreds of reviews. Business owners and customers alike can benefit greatly from a dashboard that collects, filters, and compiles review data into a single centralized platform.

Research

Define new KPIs from restaurant reviews.

Typical review platforms offer high-level KPIs in the form of average ratings, review counts, and rating distribution. However, to create a useful dashboard, we need to identify new KPIs. These KPI should address topics that are important to users who seek opinions on restaurants. A plan was devised to uncover this information.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis was conducted on popular review sites. It was observed that while these platforms offer many ways to filter and sort reviews, they lack access to comprehensive data visualizations. This requires users to gather information through reviews. Our goal is to address this gap by creating accessibility to that missing data.

Text Analysis

To gather more empirical data, Octoparse was used to extract over 600 reviews from Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook across three restaurants. These reviews were then analyzed using Voyant, an online text analysis tool, which revealed prevalent word patterns.

Affinity mapping revealed that users most frequently discussed topics related to food, service, value, and ambiance.

Survey Implementation

A survey was conducted to narrow down what our KPIs would be. Users were asked questions about service, food, value, ambiance, and subcategories that fell under these topics.

The survey was posted on several online food-related forums and received 156 participants.

Limitations

We posted our survey to 16 online forums to solicit anonymous feedback from participants. After obtaining a decent number of responses, we considered whether to collect more feedback to decrease our error margins. Ultimately, we decided to proceed with the analysis of the 156 responses we had received, which yielded a confidence level of 90% and an error margin of 8%.

Insights

Users primarily focus on topics related to food, service, and value when reading online reviews.

After compiling the survey data, it was the most popular categories and subcategories amongst users included…

Food - Taste, Preparation, Ingredients
Service - Wait Time, Professional, Friendly
Value - Cost, Return Customers, Portions

Henceforth, these would serve as the KPIs for our review dashboard.

Ideation

The data-fication of a food review app.

The flow of this app was designed to be similar to other review apps. Users first start by searching for a cuisine, then are taken to search results. From here they select a restaurant and navigate to the dashboard to view all the restaurant's information

Visualizing data systems

Upon selecting a restaurant from search results, users are directed to the dashboard. The dashboard page includes high-level information such as overall rating and review count at the top of the page, allowing users to quickly determine whether the restaurant meets their basic requirements. A line graph has also been added to the dashboard.

I designed this line graph to allow users to:

Quickly filter information by timeframe
View business updates that indicate changes to the restaurant and how these changes impact customer opinions.

Users can access the menu page from the side navigation (desktop) or tabs (mobile). Here, they can view the menu, read reviews sorted by food items, and access additional business updates related to the menu. I designed these features with the intention of providing users with multiple ways to sort through information that they may find valuable.

Narrowing Scope

The new KPIs and user reviews are displayed below the line graph on the dashboard. I made these KPIs interactive so that users can filter the information by "Food, Service, or Value."

For instance, a user can select "Food" and all the information on the dashboard will be filtered to show only data related to food. This includes the overall rating, review count, line graph, subcategories, and user reviews. Users can also filter by time frame for added specificity.

This way, people have control over the information they see and can quickly access the topics that they care about the most, rather than manually sorting through reviews.

Improvements

I received feedback from my team of researchers and design lead throughout the design process. Because of the amount of information this app would contain, our key focus was creating a simple and intuitive experience.

Based on their feedback, the following changes were made:

Switching the “on” button for a toggle switch on mobile, to turn on focus mode
Adding the values to the line graph y-axis to indicate it is depicting a change in overall rating over time
Changing the time frames for which the users could filter information for larger information samples and better data accuracy
This advice was taken and also applied to the drilldown filtered view of this dashboard.

It was recommended by my senior that I also apply some level of data visualizations to other pages outside of just the dashboard. Consolidating information in other pages helps keep design consistency while allowing users additional ways to process large amounts of data.

Final Design

‘Review Insights App’, is a platform that provides you quick and easy data-driven insights on restaurants.

Search for any cuisine to find information for any food establishment of your choice.

Retrospective

The project was a valuable experience that taught me a great deal about collaboration and communication. Rapid prototyping with a senior designer gave me a new perspective on the potential of my design skills. Communicating my design choices to my other non-design team members helped me to develop my ability to clearly articulate my ideas and to consider the needs of others.

However, we were unable to conduct usability testing for this project due to constraints. I had to rely solely on feedback to identify weaknesses and improve my designs. Usability testing would have streamlined this process and saved us time while iterating.

Overall, I am pleased with the outcome of the project and I believe that I learned a great deal from the experience.

Next Project:
Women's Healthcare - The ViFi

Restaurant Review Dashboard