Bringing Community and Personalization to Local Food Discovery.
Plaza is a food discovery startup focused on helping people find great local dishes through a personalized, visual experience. By surfacing user-submitted photos, ratings, and commentary at the dish level, Plaza aims to turn local food scenes into social communities where discovery feels personal, engaging, and driven by real people rather than generic restaurant listings.
The Challenge
When Plaza first engaged Goji Labs, the team already had a working proof-of-concept web app, but the experience was holding the product back. Core interactions felt clunky and unsatisfying, onboarding left users confused about the app’s value, and the visual design lacked the clarity and personality needed to stand out in a competitive food discovery landscape. While the underlying idea was strong, the execution made it difficult for users to immediately understand why Plaza was different from existing restaurant review platforms.
Beyond usability and branding, the product was missing a key pillar of the long-term vision: community. Plaza was not just trying to help people find restaurants, but to create a social layer around local food discovery. The existing product lacked user profiles, friend connections, comments, and activity feeds, making it hard to foster interaction or repeat engagement. Without these features, Plaza risked becoming another passive browsing tool rather than a living, social experience.
Plaza needed a partner who could do more than refresh screens. They needed help defining a cohesive visual identity, improving core UX flows, and designing the social foundation required to support long-term engagement. Goji was brought in to help transform a functional prototype into a product experience that could clearly communicate value, encourage participation, and scale into a community-driven platform.
Our Process
We began with a detailed audit of the existing Plaza web app, focusing on friction points during onboarding, usability issues within the main discovery feed, and gaps in visual hierarchy and branding. This allowed us to pinpoint where users were getting stuck, where interactions felt unintuitive, and where the experience failed to communicate Plaza’s core value quickly and clearly.
From there, we led a focused brand exploration to define a visual direction that felt modern, fresh, and trustworthy. Through moodboarding and iterative exploration, we landed on a glassmorphic design language using translucent elements and subtle gradients to establish a distinctive yet approachable identity. Once the direction was set, we built a design system to ensure consistency and scalability, then translated existing functionality into a refined, high-fidelity experience that met modern UX and interaction standards.
In parallel, we worked closely with the Plaza team to design the social features critical to their long-term vision. This included user profiles, friend connections, commenting on dishes and restaurants, and a Community tab that surfaced friend activity. We also accounted for moderation and safety, designing reporting tools and guardrails to support healthy community growth. Throughout the process, we focused on balancing simplicity with extensibility so the product could evolve without losing clarity.
The Impact
While Plaza has not yet launched a live consumer product, the engagement delivered a significantly stronger foundation for future growth. The redesigned experience clarifies Plaza’s value from the first interaction, helping users understand what makes dish-level discovery and social participation different from traditional food apps. Streamlined onboarding and improved information hierarchy reduce early confusion and lower the barrier to meaningful engagement.
The introduction of social features positions Plaza to build stickier behavior over time. User profiles, friend activity, and commenting create natural loops that encourage repeat visits, content contribution, and community interaction. These elements support longer session times and deeper engagement compared to one-off browsing experiences.
- Faster and more consistent product decision-making
- Reduced duplication, rework, and operational waste
- Clear ownership and accountability across teams
- Measurable impact on adoption, performance, and ROI
- Scalable framework for future initiatives
Project Review
Plaza Team
“Goji Labs helped us turn an early concept into a thoughtful, community-driven product experience. Their work gave us clarity around our brand, core user flows, and the social foundation we wanted to build.”
