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2014

2014

2014

Client

Yooka

Problem

Local search is broken. Small businesses struggle to compete on popular review-based discovery platforms where visibility is often pay to play advertising models and unchecked power of reviewers. Many small businesses get buried under results by competitors who can outspend them on advertisements, or held hostage by bad reviews and sometime influencer exploitation.

Research Insights

Approach

Our research, based on conducted interviews, shows that recommendations from trusted sources such as friends, family, and locals with context have a stronger influence on where people choose to go than star ratings or written reviews.

  • Mapped user journeys for consumers, influencers, and business owners to understand their distinct needs and motivations.

  • Conducted interviews with power users from platforms like Quora and Reddit to gather insights on effective recommendation systems.

  • Prioritized mood- and occasion-based discovery, moving away from traditional star ratings and static reviews.

  • Led collaborative sessions with developers to define MVP features, ensuring alignment between design vision and technical feasibility.

  • Adapted to constraints by initially implementing structured dropdowns, with plans to evolve towards more flexible, conversational inputs.

  • Focused on community engagement, designing features that rewarded authentic, real-time recommendations and fostered trust among users.

Process

Research Insights

Our research, based on conducted interviews, shows that recommendations from trusted sources such as friends, family, and locals with context have a stronger influence on where people choose to go than star ratings or written reviews.

User Goals

3 distinct user groups: Business owners, Influencers, and Everyday Consumers.

Business Owners
Increase visibility and foot traffic Protect reputation from unfair reviews Reduce dependence on paid advertising

Influencers
Establish Credibility & Become a recognized Expert
Audience Growth
Monetize and collaborate with businesses

Customer Goals
The ability to find great places that fit their needs
Trusted recommendations, based on context

Approach

  • Mapped user journeys for consumers, influencers, and business owners to understand their distinct needs and motivations.

  • Conducted interviews with power users from platforms like Quora and Reddit to gather insights on effective recommendation systems.

  • Prioritized mood- and occasion-based discovery, moving away from traditional star ratings and static reviews.

  • Led collaborative sessions with developers to define MVP features, ensuring alignment between design vision and technical feasibility.

  • Adapted to constraints by initially implementing structured dropdowns, with plans to evolve towards more flexible, conversational inputs.

  • Focused on community engagement, designing features that rewarded authentic, real-time recommendations and fostered trust among users.

Process

Because this was a word of mouth platform centered on content, I started by designing a modular card system to support a wide range of post types, including blog entries, links, images, restaurant profiles, and more. Our previous product, Yooka, helped shape the structure, as both products were built around content. To express mood visually, I introduced a frosted-glass card style that allowed background color to come through. That color became a key layer of emotional expression across the experience.

Color Study

I partnered with our content director to define a core set of moods we wanted the platform to reflect excitement, calm, sadness, romance, stress, and nervousness. I began a color study grounded in these emotions, drawing inspiration from mood rings and visual equalizers that use color and motion to evoke feeling. Some emotions mapped to more than one color, which led me to explore gradients as a flexible, expressive way to capture emotional nuance across the experience.

What I learned

  • We were right. Local search favors big businesses, often pushing smaller, more relevant places out of view

  • People rely more on trusted sources—friends, family, and locals with context—than on anonymous reviews

  • The best solutions come from listening closely to the people experiencing the problemWhile we weren’t able to continue scaling Toast beyond its first year, as a person that loves every bit of the process of finding solutions to problems, there are two things I learned