Illustration by Clara MacDonell

2020 Year in Review

Hello Medium-ers, long time no see! 👋

To say 2020 was tough is an understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the world and our lives in such a short period of time, forcing us to react and adapt. During this challenging year, we still remain committed to supporting local businesses and keeping them connected with their customers. Beyond that, we’re finding new ways to support each other and local communities with up-to-date information on how businesses are adopting new safety protocols and ensuring consumer trust and safety.

As we’re settling into the new year, we’d like to share some of the great work that came from our Yelp Product Design and Research teams in 2020. In the past year, our designers and researchers hosted 32 workshops and brainstorming sessions of all sorts (vision roadmap, concept ideation, feature prioritization), surveyed 22,884 users, and conducted 384 user interviews across Yelp consumers and business owners.

Some more good news: We’re expanding our design team to Toronto and the UK in addition to our San Francisco and Hamburg offices, and will be hiring throughout 2021. (Hello future colleagues! 🇨🇦 See what we’re hiring for.)

So what have we been up to?

For starters, we’ve established a new, scalable design system we call Cookbook and defined principles to help all design and engineering teams be more efficient with reusable components and guidelines.

We’ve also redesigned our Yelp for Business Owner site, modernized the experience with both a visual and product refresh while providing business owners more analysis and insight into how their business is performing on Yelp.

As a business owner, it’s now easier to claim your business, set up your profile, explore marketing options, and view your ad performance on Yelp. We’ve rolled out new features such as:

• Ad Impression Heat Map: With Heat Map, advertisers will have a clear visual of exactly where consumers who have seen their ads are concentrated.
• Logo: With this feature, business owners have the ability to personalize their Yelp business pages with their own brand logo.
• Customizable CTAs in Connect posts: As businesses rapidly change their operating models, business owners can let consumers know the best way to connect with them.
• Pause and restart ads: Being able to easily pause and restart ads was important for the many businesses that had to temporarily close their business, but enabled them to keep existing settings in place for when they were able to reopen. Reopening a business is already stressful, so we wanted to make sure to reduce this stress as much as possible.

For consumers, we’ve prioritized health and safety features, and introduced new features for consumers to conveniently find businesses that offer the services they need. These features include:

• COVID-19 Updated Section: Business owners can customize a personal message on top of their Yelp business page to inform consumers of how they’re operating, indicate updated services offered (such as takeout, delivery, curbside pickup, virtual services, etc.), and highlight the health and safety measures they’re taking such as “Staff wears masks”, “Social distancing enforced”, “Sanitizing between customers”, “Limited capacity”, etc.
• New virtual service offering attributes: Businesses can let consumers know if they offer any virtual services (fitness classes, tutoring, tax services, etc.) and consumers can easily find those services through these new searchable attributes and in their COVID-19 Updates section.

This year, while we’ve been spending more time at home, making it more important than ever to have a comfortable space. Our team has recently improved matching features so it’s easier to connect with home and local service businesses, as well as easily schedule appointments with service providers all within the Yelp app.

In addition, we redesigned the Yelp Waitlist Host App and included various new features to help restaurants run their front-of-house operations more smoothly and safely during COVID-19. These include:

• New front-of-house management features: Allowing restaurants to easily set and manage seating capacity to abide by social distancing measures enforced by their local governments to keep both diners and employees safe.
• Contactless experience: Providing printable QR codes to allow diners to join the waitlist contact-free.

Our Research team has made remarkable strides in moving from a more evaluative approach to more generative, while enabling Design, Product, and Marketing to conduct their own research studies. The Research team has also established research office hours for designers to schedule time to meet and get feedback from a variety of Yelp users, from consumer to business owners.

To learn more about and build empathy with business owners in the movers category, we invited Barry (manager at Commander Moving) and Frank (manager at Pure Moving) onsite to share their experiences with Yelp employees.

Left to right: Kevin Nguyen at Yelp, Barry at Commander Moving, Frank at Pure Moving

Despite spending the majority of the year in quarantine, we’ve been able to still stay connected as teammates and have fun. While we’re still collectively working on baking our sourdough loaves, we’ve had several remote hangouts — such as mail home pottery kits, cooking tutorials, Halloween contests, Secret Santa — and kept the conversation going via virtual coffee chats, Among Us game sessions, and happy hours.

Thanks for reading about our successes in 2020! Follow us on Medium & Dribbble, and check out our Yelp blog for news and updates on what’s happening in the Yelp community. Upcoming posts on Medium include Q&As with our Design Leadership team, how designers work with engineers, and many more.

As always, we welcome your feedback — drop us a line in the comments section below. See you never, 2020. ✌️

Written by Rose Chang & Brenda Kaing
PD Blog team: Clara MacDonell, Dandi Wang, Brian Chan , Xuan Zheng