Google’s Food Search

Within Google Search, food queries are the second highest search volume across Google’s products and make up 3% of total web queries. The goal of Food Search in 2021 was to create an entirely new immersive experience for hungry users that both reflects the vibe of food & restaurants while empowering users to make more confident food decisions. We focussed our attention on a brand new landing page for users in Google Search that fostered curiosity cross-platforms and inspired users to explore places, discover dishes and ultimately connect businesses with their local food community.

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MY ROLE

As UX Lead on this project I led various work streams, collaborated with VPs and stakeholders, managed+3 designers and over 10 engineers. This included spearheading ideation, cross-functional concepting, strategic roadmap planning, design & prototyping - keeping the team aligned and garnering trust and team buy-in as we headed into a series of staggered LEs which culminated in the final product.

User Problems

“What’s for dinner?” It’s that age old questions, the one we dread especially after a long day of work, we have no good ideas and finding inspiration for something new is hard. So…we tend to fallback on those 3-5 places we ALWAYS dine from. When it comes to food ordering alone we know that:

So this confirms that there is an ease and comfort in sticking with what you know.

If we’re feeling ambitious (or are just reeeeeeally bored of our go-tos) finding key menu information required a lot of effort tapping in and out of business profiles. There leaves room for a more snackable way to get the gist of what’s good at a place.

And since menu & dish info is a top user need, these insights felt quite concerning. How could we move more crucial data and place info higher up the funnel - to reduce friction and make the food search experience more efficient?

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Product Problems

Across our Search E2E flows we uncovered key moments and opportunities to improve the experience - from entry points on the main search results page SRP to improved engagement on the local dining immersive and map view;

And while having a singular framework has benefited Google to scale for wide array of intents (from restaurants to gas stations and plumbers) we wanted to provide users with a more bespoke food search experience.

There was a strong risk for disintermediation for food queries as we’re seeing more and more users reach directly for specialty food apps (the same way users moved from Google to Amazon for shopping needs) We asked ourselves “what can we learn and leverage from these native food experiences?” Things like …

Goal

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User Intents & CUJs

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Principles & Opportunities

Final Design for Phase 1

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Strategic Focus

When it comes to our Phase 1 efforts we’re choosing to really nail these 3 focus areas; building a solid foundation for the immersive (table steaks, map, all entry points from SRP) , our first launch of a Dish Search experience (differentiator for Google, food search starts with a craving, find food the way you think about food), and lastly “Decide & Compare” (updating the way we present results to help users cross evaluate, break a tie, and make a confident decision.)

Aside from “dish search” we are also leaning deep into food refinements, these will be more visual and speak to the senses, (eventually scaling up to rerank contextually) where as the more operational refinements will live as chips.

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Phase 1 Impact

+143.87% ForagerRestaurantTileClicks

+15.24% Pages with Homepage Restaurant Result Clicks

+0.19% MCCFoodOrderingToGo (Session)

+1.63% ForagerHomePageImpressions

+7.33% Choose provider page impressions

4.74% Dish tile click rate

+15.9x Search this Area interactions