App Critique: Yelp, the Non Brand
Real people, real boring reviews
On an average day I received a rather unremarkable email forwarded from my good buddy Nish Nadaraja titled “Your contributions are everything” with a big, red button that said “See my highlights.” It was an email he had just received from Yelp, presumably to get him to click and engage.
Well, one click later, I’m staring at some of the most uncompelling content I’ve seen in a while — a couple of stats about my reviews and a few updates about a home-repair project. It’s like Spotify Wrapped for people in a coma.
Nish was the marketing brain behind all of Yelp’s original messaging back in the day, so I knew he was sharing a stinker with me. I asked him what he thought, and he didn’t disappoint.
Nish: “I used to agonize over every subject line, every comma. We wanted to sound like that smart, slightly tipsy friend who knew the best taco truck in town and had opinions about bathroom tile. We were irreverent, human, a little chaotic.
This attempt? It reads like a quarterly report disguised as a hug. ‘Your contributions are everything’—come on! It’s like getting a Hallmark card from your accountant. The email could’ve been written by a bot that recently completed a course in basic empathy.
We had the blueprint for how to make users feel seen. But somewhere along the way, Yelp stopped talking to people and started talking at them. You can’t automate sincerity, no matter how many dashboards you build.”
I cut him off before he really got going.
I hear a lot of chatter in design circles about brands being too personable and trying too hard to be our friends — but what about the brands that are just really fucking boring? You know the old adage: if the product is free, you are the product. Well, Yelp, I’ve been your product for years. I’ve generated a ton of reviews and content for you. Could you at least pretend to care? This once-irreverent, bold brand has fully lapsed into irrelevancy.
Let’s start with the aesthetics. Gotta hand it to Yelp — still running with the Corporate Memphis illustration style a full decade after its peak. The monochromatic color scheme gives off strong PSAT bubble-scan energy, which I can only imagine someone in a meeting once called “hip bureaucracy.” A few sparse boxes of site-generated content later, and I’ve seen more personality in a DMV email.
What’s wild is that a company so often accused of extortion can’t even extort your attention anymore. A brand voice with personality could at least soften the cynicism. Instead, we get robotic drivel that paints Yelp as apathetic to its users. There’s no compelling story, no local flavor, no pulse — just numbers about “check-ins” and “views.” It’s like reading the back of a baseball card written by an actuary.
The app itself is marginally better, but it still feels like someone made an Instagram feed of the phone book. Take a local business, give them better photos, build an actual narrative around them. Make me believe you care about the small businesses your whole brand is built on. Because once you do a search, it’s hard to tell where the sponsored content ends and the authentic stuff begins. Reward the user for wading through the ad swamp — give us something that feels like a community again.
And don’t even get me started on the new AI features. It’s like a beige hallucination. So many companies are trapped in a plague of sameness right now, and Yelp has managed to become a sort of non-brand, existing only as a layer of utility in your life. You have brand awareness, sure — but not brand affection. People now find their neighborhood intel on Reddit or Instagram. At least those platforms have a pulse, however erratic. Yelp just hums quietly in the background, a low-buzzing fluorescent light you forget to turn off.
More life. More love for the local. Highlight the voices that actually sing in their communities — on both the user and business sides. Cajole people to create content that feels alive, not metric-driven drivel that’s only marginally more fun than tax prep.
I give Yelp’s brand identity two stars.
I apologize to my accountant; he’s actually a really useful and cool guy. Five stars.
This is my first foray into sharing my point of view on apps I interface with on daily basis, hopefully I will make App Critique a regular feature of Better Living Through Design. And full disclosure: I was the founding designer at Yelp eons ago.
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