Product design question
How would you improve Yelp’s restaurant search?
- Yelp
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement thinking for a core discovery feature: identifying a specific search relevance or trust gap.
How to approach it
- Define the core user: someone deciding where to eat now or soon, needing fast, trustworthy results.
- Identify a likely current gap, such as search results not accounting well for real time factors like current wait times or table availability.
- Propose a targeted improvement, such as surfacing real time availability and wait time estimates directly in search results.
- Address trust in reviews, since review quality and recency matter heavily for restaurant decisions.
- Define success: search to visit conversion rate and reduced bounce back to search after clicking a result.
- State the assumption about whether the focus is search ranking quality or the real time information shown.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies a specific gap, static search results not reflecting real time wait times or availability, which matters heavily for immediate dining decisions.
- Proposes surfacing live wait time or reservation availability directly in search results, reducing the need to click into each listing individually.
- Addresses review trust, weighting recent reviews more heavily since restaurant quality and even ownership can change quickly.
- Sets a measurable goal, for example a stated increase in search to reservation conversion rate after surfacing real time availability.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI polish without identifying a specific, high impact gap like missing real time availability information.
- Ignoring review recency and trust, which is central to why users rely on Yelp's search results in the first place.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get accurate real time wait time data from restaurants that do not track it digitally?
- How would you weight review recency against overall rating in search ranking?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Yelp?Walmart · Product design · Easy
- How would you design an app that helps consumers find Happy Hours?Yelp · Product design · Medium
- Design a restaurant app like Yelp for restaurant owners.Google · Product design · Medium
- How should Yelp identify closed restaurants?Yelp · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Yelp for businesses? What metrics would you collect?Yelp · Product design · Medium
- How would you add a food item to a menu in a restaurant?Yelp · Product design · Easy
More questions from Yelp
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop