In our last annual report, we talked about how deeply we care about “better food for more people” and how it is the very DNA for everything we do here at Zomato.
That’s exactly where Zomato started out — a platform to discover restaurants which had good reviews so that you can have a great experience. Whether food quality, ambience, cost, service or even the crowd that walk into their outlets — restaurant owners received 360 degree feedback from users. Businesses that worked to raise their critical reviews saw their ratings rise, which in turn brought in more customers. On the other hand, customers were happy being able to choose better places (with higher ratings) to go to. Win-win.
We now have 52 million photos and 25 million reviews for approximately one million restaurants worldwide that are listed on Zomato. This makes us one of the largest food discovery platforms in the world. However, there is a catch: only one percent of Zomato’s monthly active users (MAUs) wrote these reviews. Which means that for every 100 users who use Zomato to consume reviews, only 1 user writes a review.
Over the next 10 years, we want a lot more users to write reviews and share their perspective with the large community that we have built.
Reinventing Reviews, but where do we start?
If there’s a demand, supply follows. Therefore, we returned to our users, who provided a solution. We asked people why didn’t they read as many reviews and here’s what we found –
Clearly, our current supply of reviews didn’t adhere to the evolved demand. To make people read reviews, we had to make reviews crisper than they currently were.
We still didn’t know what was stopping people from writing more reviews, even though we now knew what kinds of reviews people liked to read. So, we asked our customers why they didn’t write reviews more often. Our takeout was ready with this. Present reviews in a short and crisp manner so that they are easy to consume
Help people to write great reviews with less effort
How were our solutions constructed? We have some of the best designers in town. When faced with a problem, they provide excellent high-fidelity solutions. This is what they conjured up after multiple iterations –
The 5 tags under “what do people say about this place” have been parsed out of 1091 reviews that we have received for this place. Would you believe that the image above shows over 1091 reviews for a particular store? You really did!
Our user testing showed that users loved this format of summarising the content of reviews in form of tags for them; so we thought that we should introduce this new content currency of tags to the creation of reviews.
In Reviews 2.0, you don’t have to be a pro reviewer to write good reviews. On Zomato, you can now add a very helpful review in less than 30 seconds. You have the option of not writing a lengthy text review. You can simply tap on a suggested tag or add a new one. Thus a good quality yet crisp review can be written in a breeze!
Now that we had solved for both creation and consumption of reviews at a design level, it was time for our engineering team to take it to the finish line.
How did we develop Reviews 2.0?
Truth be told, Reviews 2.0 was unable to achieve the ideal user experience because of compelling engineering and data challenges. Here were the top problems we had to solve for –
Problems with “Create Review”: Since tapping is faster than typing and would not require a second moderation, it would eliminate spelling errors. To save users time when writing reviews, we would need a library of tags. In order to support good quality review creation, the suggested tags would have to be relevant to that outlet
Challenges for ‘Read Review’ –
How would we show tags on the restaurant page on day 0?
How would we ensure that our existing reviews and review tags are compatible with each other? To address the aforementioned difficulties, we employed a variety of strategies, including data aggregation and machine learning models, which you can learn more about in our upcoming Review 2.0 post.
How are Reviews 2.0 performing?
With app adoption at 30 percent, Reviews 2.0 already contributes 60 percent of our daily reviews and is anticipated to increase review creation by 100 percent overall (win!). Moving forward, Reviews 2.0 opens a lot of avenues for our platform such as –
Better search: Zomato lets you search for anything, not just the name of a dish, restaurant, or cuisine. Soon, you will be able to search for experiences such as “ideal for family dinner” or “perfect for conversation.” Enable match % – Predict if a user will like or not like a place even if the user has never been there
Have you tried writing a Zomato Review 2.0 yet? If not, do download the latest version of the app from the app store and give it a spin.