Zomato, the restaurant search and discovery service, has rolled out a completely revamped version of its web and mobile product. Building on its existing restaurant database, and ratings and reviews from its millions of monthly users, Zomato has now added a new, social layer to restaurant discovery – personalized recommendations from people whose opinions you choose to value.
“Even before the advent of the internet, people relied on social opinions for restaurant discovery. In our endless discussions with our users, we realised this behaviour is still widely prevalent, but not catered to effectively by existing local discovery tools or review websites. With our new product, we want to cater to that intrinsic behaviour in an amplified, social setting,” Deepinder Goyal, Founder & CEO of Zomato, said in a press release.
Zomato’s revamped product is built on two simple pillars of thought – that individual preferences vary, and that building a more trusted ecosystem of recommendations will result in quicker and easier decision-making. From personalized search results to quickly adding restaurants to your Wishlist from anywhere on the site or app, Zomato has made restaurant discovery very swift and highly personalised. Among the new features is a FoodFeed that lets users see updates and activities from their network on Zomato, as well as restaurants visited, rated and reviewed – encouraging a more social, real-time discovery of restaurants. With this enhanced social layer, users will be able to filter search results to display recommendations from their network, i.e. the people they choose to trust and follow. To enable this personalised experience, Zomato will now be a login-only service.
The latest update also comes with a lot of changes to the design and user experience that make the product easier to use than ever before. For example, the search flow has been revamped completely to help users discover restaurants with fewer clicks, thereby offering a superior product experience. Restaurant ratings have been normalized to prevent too many restaurants being clustered within a certain range, and the search algorithm has been tweaked to show more relevant results when users are searching for restaurants. Enhanced spam-control measures have been implemented to keep out junk reviews. Users can now also easily find and invite friends to Zomato from other social networks.
“We felt it was time to stop taking small steps forward in terms of our product. This is the biggest leap we’ve taken, and that’s meant effectively rebuilding Zomato from scratch in a lot of respects. A lot of effort has gone into creating the new Zomato, and we’re very excited with the way it looks and works; we hope our users love it as much as we do,” Deepinder added.
