Burpple Case Study
Role
Time
Platform
Time
Platform
UIUX Designer
2 months (flex)
Mobile-responsive website
2 months (flex)
Mobile-responsive website
Overview
Burpple is a community-driven network for foodies to share and discover new food places, and take advantage of deals.Myself and 3 others were part of a team that was tasked with identifying current problems and improving upon what was already built in Burpple.
Burpple has a strong emphasis on contributed reviews by its users, known as Burpplers.
So we wondered, what was the main goal users were trying to address when using a food recommendations/review website? We thus created an initial problem statement and went to a few rounds of interviews.
Problem Statement (Initial)
Users need a way to find a good restaurant/food place that suits their preference within the shortest time possible so that they do not need to go through multiple platforms to choose a restaurant/food place.
01
User Interview
My team conducted 8 x 45 mins user interview and usability testing on existing site through a mix of remote and face-to face sessions. Our aim was to learn about the user’s behavior in finding and selecting restaurant/food places.Users were between the age of 28 - 47, with a varying levels of experience using Burpple.
- 2 existing Burpple users
- 4 Ex-Burpple users
- 2 new to Burpple
Affinity Mapping
After going through all those interviews, we mapped out the findings.
It got quite messy, but we managed to group together some interesting insights:
What did we gather from the affinity mapping?
6/8
trust their friends when deciding where to eat
6/8
likes seeing what their friends eat as recommendations
6/8
share their food experience with friends
7/8
don’t trust food recommendations from a single source
A trend we noticed was that it really boiled down to TRUST.
We saw that we would need to address how Burpple could establish trust between the user and source of information.
After thinking through the findings we got, we felt we were off the mark with our first problem statement. So we went back to address it and came up with a re-defined problem statement:
Re-Defined Problem Statements
1.
Users tend to trust food recommendations based
on friends rather than reviews from influencers
or strangers.
2.
Users are more likely to rely on multiple external platforms for their food recommendation research if they do not trust the reviews.
With this new direction in mind, we realigned and continued with more research to gather how we might address these problems.
02
Comparative & Competitive Analysis
Through comparative and competitive analysis, we want to gain insights and discover growth point to create a competitive edge.
The director competitors to Burpple are Chope and Tripadvisor, which are platforms focusing on food and reviews, while Instagram is our indirect competitor that excels in its social features, which was something brought up by ours during interviews.
Feature Inventory
We noticed that there were some things Burpple was lacking:
-
Filter by price - Price is a consideration for users when deciding where to dine at
-
Share feature - Allow users to share with friends to reach out to more potential customer
- “Flag” reviews - Create a safe space for users to share and read reviews
Pluses and Deltas
The above images are the obversations we made while comparing with other platforms. What coincided with our findings from the interviews were the ratings & reviews, location searching, and having appealing visuals.
What did we gather from the Competitive Analysis?
What we found from our research can be summarised in these 3 points:
Improving their existing reviews section to be more informative and attractive to readers.
Improving the overall aesthetic look to capture reader’s attention to stay on the page longer.
Improving community features for sharing of experiences.
How do the findings from the Users Interviews and Competitive Analysis support each other?
The shared findings of the different research methods we used show that trust is a huge factor in affecting how users percieve food recommendations.
There is a fine balance between building trust by featuring authentic opinions, and also being polished enough to attract and retain users attention.
03
How Might We Statements
1How might we make
How might we make
the reviews deem as trustworthy?
2
How might we make our reviews equally impactful to users compared to word of mouth from friends?
3How might we build trust
How might we build trust
and loyalty with our users?
04
User Persona
After gathering our research, we created two user personas.
From the insights from our user interviews, we identified that there were 2 groups users:
Some liked to plan in advance.
Some liked to plan spontaneously.
Each of the persona’s reflects that difference in how people search for food reccomendations.
Detailed and thorough foodie that takes the time to plan where to go for their next food discovery outing.
Often checks out what her friends have tried.
Impatient foodie that wants the planning to be fuss-free and quick.
Wants a good experience but wouldn’t take too much time planning.
05
User Flows
Persona 1 User Flow
Persona 2 User Flow
06
Design Studio & Sketches
A Design Studio was conducted where the team took 10 minutes sketching ideas on ideas that we had in mind. We took many references from websites we are familiar with and came up with potential ideas for new features.
We then voted for the designs we wanted and continued to improvise on concepts. At the end of the session, we identified the key pages we would need to design for and sketched out what we envisioned.
Multiple iterations were then made to our sketches as we discussed our views and linked the design back to our research results.
There were some things we knew we had to address in our sketches:
-
Social features for users to share their experience
-
Revamped restaurant page
-
Social feature to let users know where their friends have visited
- Expanding and improving upon the current wishlist feature already in Burpple to complement new social features
Sketches
07a
Wireframes
Desktop
Mobile
07b
Usability Testing (Lo-Fi)
We conducted 5 x 45 mins usability testing on a Lo-fi prototype through a mix of remote and face-to face sessions. Our aim was to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the redesigned Burpple website.
The feedback we got was mostly regarding the rating and review system, issues understanding the wishlist page and stories. Some people also felt the cuisine labeling within the restaurant could be improved
Possible Improvements (Lo-Fi)
4/5
Took some time to figure out what the “stories” feature was
4/5
Felt that the rating and reviews are confusing
3/5
Felt that there were insufficient filters to help them in their searches.
4/5
Did not notice/understand the wishlist feature
08a
Hi-fi protoype
![Landing Page]()
![Social Feature]()
!["Stories" Feature]()
![Locations page]()
08b
Usability Testing (Hi-Fi)
Another round of interviews with a fresh set of users.
Possible Improvements (Hi-Fi)
4/5
were unsure what does the lock on wishlist page meant
4/5
did not notice wishlist button till prompted
3/5
did not notice the menu button till prompted
4/5
had difficulting understanding the filters in the location page
09
Final Product
10
Reflection and next steps
Constraints and concerns
We designed our final product to be run on website and mobile instead of an app as users had indicated that they preferred to make their bookings on a desktop. However, the necessity of uploading photos and videos to our social feature would make it a hassle on desktop compared to using an app on a phone, where all the content of experiences is stored in.This would mean that further promoting and developing of this feature on the app is important for this feature to be easily utilised by the masses.
Other concerns were discussed:
- What if people upload non-food related content?
- What are the incentives for users to record their food items? What is the rewards for them if they share their experience on Burpple instead of their preferred social platform?
Next Steps