In a move to make to make restaurant discovery simple, Zomato, the restaurant search and discovery service, has today rolled out a completely revamped version of its web and mobile product.
Zomato has now added a new, social layer to restaurant discovery – personalized recommendations from people whose opinions you choose to value.
According to Deepinder Goyal, Founder & CEO of Zomato, “Even before the advent of the internet, people relied on social opinions for restaurant discovery. In our endless discussions with our users, we realized this behavior 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 behavior in an amplified, social setting.”
The 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 personalized.
The new FoodFeed 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 personalized experience, Zomato will now be a login-only service.
The firm says 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.
Zomato also added another country to its growing list of international locations today, with the launch of its section for Portugal. The citizens of Lisbon can now choose from over 9500 dining options in the city. The website and mobile apps will be available in Portuguese as well as English.
Founded in Delhi in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah with presence in 41 cities across India, UK, UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Qatar serves over 221,000 restaurants across 12 countries and over 16 million monthly visits globally, across its web and mobile platforms.
