The search result screen is arguably the most important screen of a restaurant review app. This screen needs to be efficient in providing information that users need to decide which restaurant they are interested in while not overwhelm the user with too much information.
Insight
I interviewed the user on how they pick a restaurant and people say they look at photos, price, menu, promotions, etc. Then I have users pick one restaurant to dine with their friend and while observing I found that they look at photos first. If the photo doesn’t look great they pass and don’t look at the rest of the information.
Another insight is when I have users show me how they typically find-discover new restaurants and found that one user uses Instagram to discover restaurants and our users(from the persona) use Instagram a lot. This inspires us to redesign our search result screen.
Design
The insight inspired us to created the grid view. The grid will only have a photo, restaurant name, distance from the user, making exploring restaurants more fun, photogenic and visual.
Peek View
To make up for the missing information we added “Peek View” users can touch and hold to see more information. Instagram also features similar interaction.
Validate
We can’t measure click-through rate because the grid has less information. We can’t infer that users clicking on the result means they are interested in that particular restaurant. It could simply mean they needed more information. We ran A/B Testing one group would get the grid view as default and the other would get the traditional list we measure the retention between two groups. The people who get the grid as default has higher retention.
Final note
Typically we do a lot of competitor analysis and we test out a lot of things that worked for other app but this is one feature I’m quite proud of because we’re the only restaurant, point of interest, local guide app to display the search result in grid mode.