Yelp Design System

Challenge — scaling design & systems

Team: 1 product manager, 1 researcher, 3 product designers, 3 engineers

Working with consumer, business, and engineering teams to overhaul Yelp’s outdated styleguide. In the last 2 years, Yelp’s design team has tripled in size. With many teams and verticals, Yelp’s neglected component library became a source of frustration and resulted in inconsistent, unpolished designs added to an already cluttered product. Yelp needed a more systematic approach to guiding & designing across a multitude of products & platforms.

Goal — a modern visual language for Yelp’s users

Both market research & product user studies showed that people perceive Yelp to be generally trustworthy however with neutral or negative sentiment. In the words of users, Yelp is “old” but reliable, “outdated” but useful, and “hasn’t changed much”. In late 2018, I began working with consumer teams & stakeholders to brainstorm, workshop, and design the foundations of a new visual system with the goal of creating an “inspirational experience for Yelp’s users”.

Principles behind Yelp’s ‘Cookbook’

Internally nicknamed “Cookbook”, we spent weeks in workshops, design sprints, and conversations with stakeholders to come up with the principles & foundations of the design system. On a high level, our product & design guiding principles:

• Human & Authentic

• Trustworthy & Reliable

• Focused & Useful

• Facilitator, not the star