Empowering Black-Owned Businesses on Yelp
Timeline:
June 2020 (3 weeks)
Collaborators:
Ines Elloumi, Product Manager
Brenae Leary, Senior Communications Manager
Scott Tusk, Illustrator
Kathleen Liu, Senior Public Relations Specialist
Overall Impact:
7,043% increase in searches for Black-owned businesses
Shipped to 100% of iOS, Android & Web
My Impact:
Defined 3 in-product surfaces for label placement
Designed 2 prototypes for Yelp users and Yelp Business owners
Conducted qualitative virtual user research with 6 participants
Led product principles workshop
Problem: Business owners & their patrons wanted a way to identify Black-Owned businesses on Yelp.
In Summer 2020, national protests placed the spotlight on the strained relationship between law enforcement and members of the Black community.
Our team saw an opportunity to create a Black-owned business label on Yelp that would give users the ability to search, identify and support Black-owned businesses in their area.
RESEARCH
Business owners' top priorities were label visibility, longevity, & control
I connected with Black business owners via phone interviews to understand their priorities, challenges, and potential concerns.
Based on phone interviews with Black business owners across San Francisco, East Bay, and Oakland in June 2020
By June 2020, the pandemic had disproportionately impacted Black entrepreneurs leading to a 40% drop in the number of working Black business owners.
The Washington Post
Listening to our users' priorities defined the value we needed to include
As we were working fast to create a solution, our team established several fundamental principles to guide decision making:
1. The business label required opt-in by the business owner
2. The business label would be free
3. The business label would be visible on multiple surfaces
4. The business label would be non-ephemeral
Defining these rules contextualized the project’s opportunities/limitations and would define future decisions.
LEVERAGING USERS' BEHAVIOR
Instead of designing new surfaces, I integrated the label into multiple existing touchpoints
Significant traffic between the search results and business pages ensured high visibility. Even if someone didn't notice the label on search results, they may still see it on the following 2, highly-trafficked pages.
We implemented auto-fill in search so users could type part of the keyword Black-owned and auto-fill suggested different business categories like Black-owned restaurants, businesses, local services, and more.
Integrating the label into existing surfaces (instead of building new ones) gave the label a permanent location to stay on Yelp.
I chose to add the Black-Owned business label to the business highlights page with other secondary information about the business
CONSIDERING USE CASES
Supporting business owners not on Yelp
Not all business owners who would want to display the label would necessarily do so. Some businesses remain unclaimed on Yelp. Alternatively, not all business owners actively manage their page.
As a solution, our team devised that if a certain number of reviews for a business mentioned Black-owned, search results for that business would denote: X reviews mention Black-owned.
This solution gave users the opportunity to glean potential Black-business ownership while avoiding giving a business the Black-owned label without their explicit opt-in.
FINAL DESIGNS
Prototypes
Prototype A: Black-Owned Business label across multiple in-app surfaces
Prototype B: Business owner app (Yelp for Biz) opt-in flow
RESULTS
Black-Owned business searches increased 7,043%
In a two-week period between May 25 and June 10 2020, 35x increase in search frequency occurred for Black-owned businesses (and related terms) compared to search history collected during the same time in 2019.
Bookstores were the 2nd highest searched category, reflecting a national rise in demand for books about social justice.
Twitter reactions (shared with permission)
I turned this design into a system to support groups like Asian and Latinx-owned businesses...
Learnings
I was inspired by the engagement of the Yelp community around this feature — from business owners adding the label to their pages and users searching and supporting them.
The success of this project gave a signal to product leadership that designing tools to serve our community's needs can be impactful for members of the community and beneficial for business.
Special thanks to Alexis Glenn, Clara MacDonell, Chris Short, Kelly Kinch & Xuan Zheng.
Forbes: Support For Black-Owned Businesses Increases More Than 7,000%, Yelp Reports