CS W4170 User Interface Design—Final Projects
Fall 2012

Project Overview

Yelp provides access to a wide variety of information about local businesses, ranging from useful factual data to reviews. One of the features that the Yelp application supports is the ability to tag ("bookmark") businesses of interest, optionally labeling them "to try" or "to review", or adding a textual note. However, the facilities that Yelp offers to browse bookmarked businesses are quite primitive. Bookmarks are presented in a single linear list that can be filtered and sorted using a small set of straightforward criteria, can have their labels and notes edited, and can be deleted. As we saw in class, while most students used Yelp, very few used Yelp bookmarks. This raises some interesting questions: Are there better ways to tag items, to organize them, to present them, and to interact with them to meet the user's needs?

Each of our final project teams addressed these questions by developing personas and use scenarios, and creating a persistent HTML/JavaScript application that used Yelp API v2 and OAuth to allow their users to search for businesses.  The teams concentrated on:

The following projects were presented at the end of the semester:

Awesomenaut screenshot Awesomenaut.  Awesomenaut allows you to add custom description tags (like "cheap", "pizza", or "near school") to Yelp businesses with a few simple clicks. After you've tagged the businesses, simply go to "Your Tags" to filter businesses by your tags. It's a quick and easy way to organize businesses without using lists.
(Jose Rodriguez, Philip Liou, Robert Tolda and Rotem David)
Breadcrumbs screenshot Breadcrumbs.  Breadcrumbs is an app designed to help you bookmark and organize businesses you've found on Yelp. The name "Breadcrumbs" should make you think of a trail of crumbs along a path, guiding you towards your favorite restaurants and bars.
The core functionality of Breadcrumbs centers around two pages: one where you can add bookmarks, and one where you can manage your existing bookmarks. You can organize your bookmarks into lists, check their Yelp reviews, and take your own notes. Breadcrumbs's simple organization and streamlined design will make it easy for you to get the most out of Yelp's deep database of businesses.

(Jonathan Balsano, Logan Donovan, Mark Micchelli and Yanyi Luo)
Chowhounds screenshot Chowhounds.   In this program, users can search interesting restaurants, bookmark them by existing labels or their own new labels and add to their favorites list.
The favorites list (bookmarked list) is presented in tiles. Users can add businesses to a comparison list, go to related Yelp page, manage the tags, and filter or sort their favorites list by various criteria. They can also compare up to six businesses and see their locations on maps on the "compare" page. Users' locations can be set and stored in "set location" page.
You can check out the website here.
(Binyan Chen, Jingzhe Song and Ying-Chi Meng)
FAKD screenshot FAKD.   FAKD, an intuitive website that allows users to easily manage their Yelp bookmarks, is very useful for people who relocate often and/or work far from home. When people move to a new city, it is hard to keep track of restaurants and other venues that fit their tastes. From friends' recommendations and online user reviews, our users can bookmark businesses and organize them in a meaningful, easy to remember way.
(Ananta Pande, Dylan Drop, Fernando Luo and Kofi Opoku)
Good Eats screenshot Good Eats. Good Eats is the Yelp bookmarking service that you will love to use. Modeled on the idea of pinning cards to a corkboard, all of your saved businesses will always look fantastic. Good Eats gives you the power when it comes to sorting and filtering your saved places. Create up to 5 custom categories and assign them to businesses as you please. Sort businesses by name, rating, and popularity. Leave yourself notes for each place as well as locate it on the highly regarded Nokia maps, built right into every information card. If you are an avid Twitter user, you can tweet the links to the Yelp page right from any information card as well. Never before has it been so much fun to save your favorite places for later.
(Cole Diamond, Curtis Cooper, Jervis Muindi and Matthew Cowan)
Hel-lp screenshot Hel-lp. Hel-lp is a web application that uses the Yelp API, and allows users to search for businesses. When the user searches for a business, the search results will be shown in a box in the main container. The user is able to scroll to see all of the results. Hel-lp also provides the functionality for users to tag and quick save items, and browse their bookmarks by category, list and calendar.
(Feifei Zhong, Kyle Rego, Nishtha Agarwal and Qian Yu)
Tag Team screenshot Tag Team.  Tag Team helps you find great places to eat, shop, drink, and play near you. You can search for places, filter and sort results, read reviews from peers, bookmark places that you think look interesting or want to avoid, and efficiently browse all of your bookmarks.
(Alden Quimby, Andrew Hitti, Colfax Selby and Matt Dean)
Yelp!Help screenshot Yelp!Help. Yelp!Help is a tool designed to help you organize your Yelp bookmarks. While the Yelp bookmarks page only allows for filtering by one category at a time and sorting by either Name or Date Added, Yelp!Help expands upon these options by providing a simultaneous filter system and added sorting options. The user can filter by multiple categories and locations at once, giving them more control over what content they want to see.
Additionally, while Yelp only allows users to delete bookmarks one by one, Yelp!Help lets the user select and delete bookmarks in a batch, a useful addition when dealing with larger bookmark lists, or if the user wishes to remove all businesses of a certain category or in a certain location. Yelp!Help is geared toward those who travel often and need a quick and simple way to keep track of relevant businesses in multiple locations. It provides a multitude of sort and filter options in a simple, uncluttered interface.

(Andrew Goldin, Siddhi Mittal and Stephen Somuah)
YelpLists screenshot YelpLists. Our application's goal is to provide a better way to categorize a user's Yelp bookmarks so that they are easier to find later on. Instead of just Places to Try/Review, we allow the user to create as many lists as possible with whatever names they want. Furthermore, venues can appear on multiple lists if they span multiple categories. The application is dynamic, so that the interface is uninterrupted and the user is not required to reload at all.
(John Liu, Kevin Lin, Ron Shapiro and Tikue Anazodo )
YelpMark screenshot YelpMark. YelpMark is a Yelp bookmark enhancing web application that enables users to tag and save businesses discovered through the Yelp API. Users are able to see ratings, reviews, business information, and retrieve driving directions to the business. With YelpMark, users can search via voice or simple text input. Yelpmark supports geolocation, helping users find local results faster. Users can filter both bookmarks and search results by rating, user defined tag, and category.
(Alexandros Sigaras, Michael D'Egidio, Morris Hopkins and Seungwoo Lee )
Yelp Minion screenshot Yelp Minion. Yelp Minion is that little helper you wish you had. It takes the best of the Yelp search functionality and adds all new aspects of search and bookmarking that make finding, saving, and organizing your favorite places that much easier. One of the key features of our app is the ability to concatenate personal labels to restaurants that are bookmarked. That way, you can define bookmarks by tags such as "family friendly" or "date night", making these places easier to find when you need them most. Through the use of HTML, Twitter bootstrap, and jQuery to parse the JSON file from the Yelp API, we developed this product to be your little Minion that you can take with you, guiding you through the clutter of the native bookmarking API.
(Don Yu, Gil Chen-Zion, Jonathan Jia and Nikita Nadkarni)
YelpTastic screenshot YelpTastic. With the Yelptastic application, users can organize their favorite spots to visit and easily browse through their favorites at a later time. We give them the functionality to search for new favorites, and then attach their own notes about a business when the user adds the place to their favorites. They can add tags—keywords that can help them in identifying unique things about a business when they add it to their favorites. Users are capable of filtering their favorites by rating or sorting the businesses by rating. Our users can even search through their existing favorites and the businesses wlil be returned as long as the query occurs in the favorite's name, tag, or notes. We present the favorites in a grid, allowing the user to view several of these bookmarks at the same time, and easily perform filtering, sorting, and interaction with Yelp's content.
(Daniel Mercado, Jenee Benjamin, Orlando Pineda, and Varun Ravishankar)