Ronnie Mu App Analysis 2/7/2019

The app I was assigned to analyze was the Yelp app. Yelp is a local search service with a

crowd-sourced review forum made by the users of the app themselves. The app allows you to

search for various unique businesses and decide which business you want to do business with,

specifically restaurants (but other businesses and services are available for viewing on Yelp such

has house services, etc.). The feature I chose to focus on within the app is the app’s “collections”

tab. In this tab, users can view various groups of businesses that pertain to a certain category. For

example, one may find a “Best Mexican food” collection with myriad local Mexican restaurants

that are considered the best among local reviewers. What was not obvious to me was that these

collections were also created by users themselves and not by the app. You have the ability to

make collections that are either visible to the entire public, or visible to only you.
As you can see here, just for an example, I made a collection called “Favorite restaurants.” I

saved one of my favorite restaurants around New Brunswick called Bubbakoo’s burritos. Now if

people wanted to know what my favorite restaurant was, they can look at my collection and try

the restaurants in my collections out. If I wanted to just have this list for myself just to remind

me of what restaurants I have to choose from, I simply need to switch this collection to private

mode.

The designers of the app were successful in presenting the “collections” feature to its

users. The designers wanted to make a way for users to have more interaction with the app while

also aiding in the crowd-sourcing of the app. In this feature, the designers made sure to keep the

layout clean and simple which made it easier to understand the functions of the feature for the
users. They also succeeded in presenting this feature by making all the visible collections look

“important” to the users viewing them. This makes it so that everyone’s collections of

restaurants/ businesses have significant value to its viewers.