DataApp

😋

Yelp App

Starting A Restaurant Business in Philadelphia with An Interactive and Comprehensive Tool

Duration
3 weeks, 2022/10

Team
Qianru Zhang
(UX Designer)

Tools
Python
Streamlit

DESIGN GOAL

Help Business Owners Decide Restaurant Type and Location in Philadelphia Using Interactive Data Science

Business owners want to navigate multiple factors of existing restaurants when considering opening a restaurant. These information can be easily accessed through public dataset from Yelp. However, interpreting raw data can be a challenge. To address this need, we decided to design an interactive data app to help business owners review restaurant price range, ratings, location, and categories with ease.

Taking into account data availability and completeness, we've chosen to focus on Yelp data specifically from Philadelphia.

DEVELOPMENT

Using Python and Streamlit Tools to Build An Interactive Restaurant Insights Tool

To fulfill the design goal, we researched available tools and nailed down the following features:

Filter restaurants according to categories and display details.
For a selected area, visualize the distribution of price range, star, and numbers of different restaurants.
For a selected price range and star, display the number of restaurants under different categories.

To implement these features, we began by conducting Exploratory Data Analytics to clean the data. Subsequently, we adopted multiple tools within Python and Streamlit to develop the interactive features of showing different levels of interactions between data.

OUTCOMe

Check out Existing Restaurants by Categories on An Interactive Map

Review Numbers, Ratings and Price of Different Restaurant Categories in A Specific Region

Locate Restaurant Category by Targeted Price Range and Star Rating

A fun insight from the data exploration: In Philadelphia, bars are significantly more than other restaurants. And the price range of bars are relatively higher. Also, bars usually have good star ratings. It might be a good idea to open a bar in Philadelphia!

Key Takeaways

If There Is A Will, There Is A Way

At the beginning, we planned to use Altair for developing interactive features. However, I encountered the limitation that Altair lacked support for zoom in/out functionality, a crucial aspect for user experience. Following extensive research, we found that Folium offered an ideal solution to address this gap. As a UX designer, we always commit to advocate for users and explore avenues to enhance the experience.

Employ Evidence-Based Approaches To Avoid Assumptions

Through this project, we not only delivered a valuable tool to business owners to aid decision-making but also uncovered insightful revelations and recommendations driven by data analysis. Some of these insights were unexpected, which indicates our intuition can be biased. This experience made me realize the power of using data as a powerful tool to challenge assumptions and guide more informed decisions.