Beli
Track and share your favorite restaurants with your friends.
If there is one app I use more than Outlook, it would be Beli. If there is one thing I love more than _ , it would be food. Beli has become my pitstop everytime I eat outside. Beli has been especially helpful this past summer as I interned in San Francisco. It became my food diary and gave me a newfound appreciation for the city.
Why I love Beli
Other than the fact that I can use this app to justify my obsession with eating out, there are 3 main reasons why I love using Beli.
1. Rational ranking
Think about the last time you were asked to rank a dish. “5/10 bread”. Yeah okay cool, but how does that relate to all of the other breads you’ve had? Why is it a 5/10? Where does this number come from?
What Beli does a phenomenal job at is simplifying the restaurant ranking process. Instead of fishing for a number out of the blue, you rank places by comparing them to a spot you previously visited. For example, let’s say I was at Restaurant A today. As I rank my meal, it will ask me to choose between Restaurant A and Restaurant B (some restaurant I went to last week). After a couple rounds of choosing between Restaurant A and another spot, Beli uses its algorithm to give me a score for Restaurant A.
This process feels more “rational” than thinking of a random number. It is also much more useful intuitively – when I rank, I am thinking about how this food compares to food I have in the past. Beli extracts this process out of the brain and allows me to do it on my phone.
2. Food becomes social
Like other social media apps, Beli allows me to connect with my networks at a deeper level. I love seeing what my friends eat and it allows me to understand a bit more about their taste in life. Like BeReal, Beli highlights portions of a user’s “mundane” life.
However, the true beauty of Beli’s social game is that it allows me to see how my friends ranked a spot I have been meaning to go to. It also allows me to see what my friends got at the table and what their favorite dishes were. With this data, I am able to make more informed decisions on where to go, and the trust I have in the reviews increases since they come from my strong tie network.
3. Memory
The last and if not most important reason why I love Beli is because it expands my food memory. One of my favorite features of Beli is the long press during ranking. When I am asked to choose between Restaurant A and another restaurant I went to ages ago, my decision is clouded. I don’t remember what I ate at the other restaurant and this impacts how I rank. Beli solves this problem by allowing me to long press on the other restaurant’s icon. In doing so, my review of the past restaurant pops up, and I can see the photos and notes I inputted during the time of ranking. This allows me to keep this food “longer in my stomach”!
One interesting thought I learned in my social computing class was that all successful social media apps extract some knowledge from your brain and shares it with the rest of the world. With Beli, my knowledge of all the food I’ve had becomes the feed of my friends, and this is what makes it successful.
Why I hate Beli
Now to be clear, I don’t hate Beli. But among the list of things in the app that itch me the wrong way, there is one big problem that needs to be solved. Beli is a social app, but it is not entirely social right now.
I was finishing my dinner with a friend one night this summer, and as per usual, we were ranking the restaurant on Beli. As I finished my ranking and waited for my friend to finish his, he reminded me that I hadn’t tagged him in my post. The thing is, there is no point in tagging someone in a post, at least for now. All you see is that I went out to eat with so and so, and it doesn’t necessarily capture my attention when all I am focused on was how good the food compared to the rest of the food I’ve had in the past. Therefore, Beli needs to make the tagging experience more social.
Here is an initial diagnosis:
Search for friend
Tagged friend
Final tagged post
Tagged notification
There are two journeys to diagnose – one where you are doing the tagging, and the other where you are being tagged. Let’s start with the former.
When you tag a friend, the ranking process does not change. Your rating of the food is not dependent on your friend, although the food experience was very much a social experience. Beli does not reflect this nuance within the ranking process.
When you are tagged (frame 4), you receive a notification but no further action is taken. You can comment, like, bookmark your friend’s post, but you inherently have no say in their ranking. Again, the social quality of dining with friends becomes individual.
This is a problem because if Beli wants to truly become a social app, it needs to reflect the social nature of group dining. Users cannot connect with each other on a deeper level if the app works better as a personal diary.
The solution to this problem: Joint rating
To think about how Beli can make the tagging process more interactive, I looked into their existing user interactions. Like all social apps, when a user follows you, you are given the option to “Follow back”. This created a streamlined process where users are both able to engage with each other. Let’s make this the same for the tagging process! Instead of being notified that someone has tagged you, let’s create a process which allows you to do something with this tagging.
I took inspiration from Instagram’s collaborator feature. When a user tags you in a post, you can now rank a place together. This highlights the social aspect of dining. You might’ve loved a restaurant, but your friend not so much. Joint ranking allows for this mismatch to be taken into account, and the final rating becomes a lot more realistic to the actual dining experience.
Let’s look at some FAQ’s:
Wouldn’t this mess up my rating list?
No, because although the average rating between you and your friend is displayed to your feed, your individual rating dictates where the restaurant is placed within your list!
How do you coordinate between who does the posting?
This is completely up to you and your group! Only one person starts the rating chain, and the rest follow. This ensures that you have everyone on board using Beli before you get the final rating (this can encourage more users to be on the app as well).
Joint Post option
Individual Post option
Why is this important to Beli?
Although this is something that would definitely be helpful to me, it is important that Beli makes the joint ranking process interactive if they want the app to become more social. There is little incentive for friends to join the app if all they do is see what their friends eat. Users will get tired after some time, so it is important that they learn that Beli is an app where they are also able to create with their friends. This gives power to the users and more motivation to continue ranking their favorite spots.
Where is this going?
Crazily enough, my friend and I will be working with Beli this year! This is still a shock to me considering how much I truly love this app and can’t wait to make it even better. But maybe that’s just what happens when your stomach stays hungry :)
