Instagram Explore: Discover Local Eats

Design an Instagram feature to help people find a restaurant.

Related to Product Design
For Platform PM

Add Your Answer

Answers (3)

Rob Martin

Objective: Help people find restaurant at Instagram will be a cool feature as instagram has a lots of information of user likes, location, friends, the suggestions will be more personal for users. This feature will fit well in Instagram as people will be sharing the best moments of their food and restaurant experience with wider community helping friend and business.

User groups:

1. Food lovers

Love to go out often
Go out once or twice a week
Go out once a month kind

2.Restaurant owners

3. Restaurant staff

Prioritized: Food overs who go out often. With new feature , we need people who can readily adopt and help in product growth with wider use cases than other groups.

Pain Points:

1. To many choices creates confusion to make choice: what cuisine, what restaurant, what food item….

2. Hard to know based on hundreds of comments what people are rating the restaurant for- some care more for service, wait time, food choices, food quality, ambience etc

3. User does not know the people who are rating high or low. A recommendation from friend will be high priority over stranger’s recommendation

4. Writing reviews for a restaurant and food : All users do not have that skill.

Solutions:

1. User using restaurant check in feature can rate the restaurant and food item on the menu. Instagram knows user location, past restaurant and dish choices. Instagram can suggest user based on this data. User who loved restaurant A, also loved restaurant B. This way user will keep getting new choices. More the user uses this feature more fine tuning will provide user a better experience.

2. The rating systemtoday is more overall Vs caregorized. The new reaturant rating can be on different categories – Ambience, wait time, Food quality, Service etc. This will be more easy to digest data while making choice for a restaurant Vs trying to read essay type comments from people while making restaurant choice.

3. As Instagram knows who my friends are, who does user hangs out more, share stronger bond, it can share recommendations based on frien’s rating

4. Solution #2 will help cover apin pont #4 as well as users who might find writing a challenge can easily express a 5 star rating system.

Metrics:

New feature, so more focus in who is aware of this feature and is adopting it.

1. % of users who search Restaurants on Instagram and trend over time

2. % of users who used the feature also rated the reasturant

3. % of user who looked at recommendations and later checked in the restaurant

4. User retention over 30 day period

5. # of check ins per month

6. # of restaurant food pics per month and trend over time

Prioritize #1 for initial phase as this is a new feature.

Trade Off: Impact on other Instagram engagement should be observed as we want people to continue using Instagram for connecting

Gary Houston

Let’s start with a few clarification questions – Does a restaurant search product on instagram really fit into the facebook mission?

Facebook’s mission is to connect people and give them a platform to express themselve.

At first glance, a restaurant search product may not have a big role in connecting people or letting them express themselves. However, a few use cases or context where that would be the case is:

Restaurant discovery in a social setting – finding a restaurant to meet my network
Restaurant discovery to organize an event.
Enabling restaurant owners to connect with the audience

Is it okay if I prioritize one of these and identify the user segment or would you have a preference in what direction we should go

How would we prioritize

Cost Vs benefit – Impact Vs LOE

	Impact	LOE
Restaurant discovery in a social setting	High – large user base	Difficult
Restaurant discovery to organize an event.	Low because of limited reach	Easy
Enabling restaurant owners to connect with the audience	Low because of limited reach	Easy

Let’s identify some segments and paint points they might have for a social restaurant discovery use case

Segment –

Millennials vs 40+ – different preferences and urgency

Power user vs casual user – Identify power users using their outdoor or social activity

Local vs new Geo

I would like to focus on millennial power users and not limit myself to the geo dimension. The solution may not change a lot when discovering restaurants locally as compared to a new geo.

This will give us a large user base and thus have meaningful impact

Some pain points of these segments

Discovery of feasible pool is a challenge especially with a group
- Individual Preference (Hard)
- Individual preference (Soft)
Logistic stand point
- How much each of us have to travel
- Individual preference (travel)
- Availability
Execution of the event
- Everyone remembers
- Is on time

Prioritization of pain points

Value vs cost framework – Discovery to me seems to be the biggest bottleneck. While there is benefit in organizing the logistics and execution, I see more value in discovery

To be it seems to be a bigger problem to solve
A problem which we as a facebook are more equipped to solve as we know about the social network and hence about the individual preferences

Think of some solutions

Proactive reach out – A solution where we make proactive recommendation about
- Where to go
- Who to go with

Say, see a birthday coming up or a user nearing a 2 week time frame, which is his usual stretch for a social gathering. Further we know that last time he went with certain friends, some of whom are still in town, or a friend coming into the town. We can have a push notification, a feed item or a autocreated story to help them plan something

Reactive – We know someone is planning an event and are exploring instagram to advertise the same. We could guide them towards this restaurant discovery funnel
Manually triggered – We use data to understand and predict the need for finding a restaurant. At the right time we showcase this as a tool for user to pick up
- Chatbot
- ??

I like solution 1 because we are doing the most for the user and making the most seamless. At the same time option 3 would be the most common use case. If I were to prioritize value I will start from option 3 and enhance the same down the line to build a solution close to option 1.

What metrics would I use to measure the efficacy

we would look at the funnel itself

How many time the option was triggered
% time users got in
% times users converted successfully
NPS score ?

When I start, I would like to track 1 and 4, that gives me a sense of the reach and efficacy but over time we may move to a more broader metric like NPS scores

Anushka Garg

Clarification

For the purposes of this question, I’m going to define a restaurant as anywhere that sells ready-to-eat food. This means that we are considering Michelin Star Restaurants, food trucks, and McDonalds all restaurants. A grocery store would not be considered a restaurant, unless there is a sandwhich shop selling ready-to-eat subs inside of it which would count.

We’re going to make the assumption that people are finding restaurants because they are interested in purchasing food from them instead of some other random edge case like getting them to buy a user’s home made pasta sauce, etc.

We’ll consider dining in, picking up takeout, ordering delivery, and making reservations as all valid use cases for finding a restaurant.

Goals

Before we dive into figuring out a solution, it’s important to first take a step back and think about why we are doing this. I’ve found the best way to get to the crux of this question is to think about the company’s mission statement. In Instagram’s case, their mission statement is to capture and share the world’s moments.

This mission statement directly relates back to the question in the sense that a lot of memorable moments in users lives that are worth capturing and sharing happen over food and dining. I know from personal experience that I have a lot of great memories from eating at restaurants and I think this sentiment is echoed by instagram’s users based upon the sheer volume of food pictures shared on the platform.

Goal: For the sake of this project, we will aim to increase the number of dining moments that are captured and shared via Instagram.

Users

It’s hard to come up with a magic bullet that solves everything for everyone, so one of the ways I like to narrow scope is to examine the users of the feature or product and pick to focus on. Right away there are two distinct user groups that come to mind:

Diners – These are the people looking for restaurants and eating food
Restaurants – Business accounts managed by restaurant ownership who want their restaurant to be discovered by diners

I’m going to suggest we focus on the diner user segment for a couple of reasons. First of all, in terms of sheer volume there are a lot more diners using instagram than there are restaurants. Secondly, but more importantly, I feel like the diners user segment lends itself better to our goal of increasing the number of dining moments that are captured and shared on Instagram. The diners are more likely to take a picture of their meal and post it to instagram as this is common already. Furthermore, it would be very awkward for a restaurant owner to walk over unsolicited and take a picture of your meal and post it to IG.

Even amongst the Diners user segment we could break it down further into personas and use cases, like gourmands looking for fine dining or college students looking for something cheap and convenient; however, I am going to intentionally reframe from doing this as we don’t want our solution to end up as too granular or niche.

Alternatives

Now that we have our user segment picked out we’re going to want to dive into their current experience so we can get a better sense for some of their pain points and dissatisfaction that we could improve upon. Here are some current alternatives I can think of for finding a restaurant:

Word of mouth / Suggestions from Friends – I like the social aspect of this alternative and it would be cool if we could incorporate something similar into our solution as Instagram is a social media platform.
Online Reviews (Yelp / Google) – Pop up even if you’re just trying to find a restaurants address. Quality of reviews is sketchy. Yelp will remove poor reviews if paid.
Delivery Services (UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub) – Displays a list of restaurants nearby, majorly focused on the delivery side of dining. There are a ton of restaurants I’ve ordered from 10+ times but have never eaten at in person.

Pain Points

Now that we have a decent understanding of the current state of affairs when it comes to finding a restaurant for diners, let’s go ahead and list out some pain points or areas of frustration for users:

It’s hard figuring out what you want to eat, doubly so if you are in a group
You don’t know if the online reviews can be trusted. Yelp will remove poor reviews if paid and people rate upon weird criteria. For example, a gentleman giving a restaurant a low rating for having poor vegetarian options when the restaurant was a steakhouse…. Trying to catch fish in the desert….
What is going to be the best value for my money
Is there going to be a wait at the restaurant? Should I have called ahead and made a reservation?

Solutions

Based upon the above pain points, let’s start brainstorming some solutions to help alleviate the users’ frustration:

Local Restaurant Feed -> Underneath the explore section, there would be a new option at the top called “Restaurants” when clicked it on it would give you a feed of photos and videos taken at restaurants physically nearby to the user’s current position. On each of these pieces of media there would be a little Fork and Spoon icon in the bottom left that when tapped would display information about the restaurant it was taken at.
IG based customer loyalty program -> If you share a photo of your food at the restaurant to your public IG feed and tag the restaurant enough times you will get a reward like a 5% discount or a free dessert, etc.
Chat Bot Restaurant Recommender -> Instagram could set up a chat bot account with a little chef’s hat that users could message when they need help finding somewhere to eat. You could bounce ideas off of it like “I want something cheap and spicy, but not Mexican because I had that for lunch”. The chat bot could then provide recommendations for you on where to eat based off of a variety of data. For example, it could see that you liked your friends picture of spicy biang biang noodles yesterday and then recommend a restaurant near you that serves biang biang noodles.

Prioritization

In all likelihood we won’t have the resources or bandwidth necessary to build out all three solutions in parallel so let’s pick one to focus on. In order to guide that conversation I’m going to build out a comparison matrix:

Ease of Implementation, User Satisfaction, Relevance to Goal

1. A, A-, A-

2. B+, A-, A

3. C+, A, C

I’m going to make the suggestion that we prioritize building out solution #2 the IG based customery loyalty program. This addresses pain point #3 directly by offering users a monetary reward / discount for their repeated patronage of a restaurant. Additionally, it indirectly addresses pain point #1 in the sense that users will be more likely to decide on eating at a restaurant where they have loyalty points. Most importantly, this feature most directly relates to our as users will be capturing and sharing more of their dining moments as a way of earning restaurant loyalty points.

Summary

In order to increase the number of diners capturing and sharing their dining moments on instagram, we are going to allow restaurants to offer IG enabled customer loyalty programs to patrons. By sharing a photo of their meal to IG and tagging the restaurant users will earn loyalty points to a reward such as a discount or a free dessert. This will help the users get the most value out of their money when dining out and nudge them towards certain restaurants when deciding where to eat. Most importantly, this will directly impact our goal by incentivizing users to capture and share their dining moments on Instagram.