Fixing Their App So You Can Eat
Apr 2026 -
Over half of U.S. households contain someone with a dietary restriction (NIH, 2022), and 70% of Americans eat out regularly (YouGov, 2024). For the subset with serious restrictions — celiac disease, severe food allergies, strict religious or ethical diets — the simple act of picking a restaurant becomes a research project.
We're proposing a new layer inside Google Maps that
1. Filters restaurants by specific allergens and diets (peanut, soy, gluten, dairy, halal, kosher, vegan, etc.) — not just a vague "allergy friendly" toggle
2. Flags individual menu items inside a restaurant's listing with allergen information - users can see what they can actually order before they arrive.
3. Works as a discreet planning tool — letting users research and suggest a safe restaurant to their friend group without having to disclose their restriction at all.
Why should you care? This is a project where the stakes are real (cross-contamination can hospitalize someone with celiac or a severe allergy), the existing solutions are time-consuming (menu parsing, trust signals, liability, incomplete data), and the answer has to live inside a product used by a billion people.
Business Impact: This project has meaning and purpose from a business perspective in terms of market size and value. With +50% of households reporting to have some sort of dietary restriction or allergy, this leaves a large number of people that need solutions to everyday dining options outside of their homes. Several people go out to eat at restaurants, with the restaurant industry generating 1 trillion dollars annually. According to Nielsen, 64% of consumers value transparency in their food ingredients, leaving restaurants at a much higher pedestal with consumers. With these metrics combined, it opens up the market size for us to go in to provide the transparency that several consumers want for their ingredients at restaurants. The lack of allergen and dietary filtering on google maps is the business problem we will handle for this market’s unmet need for clear, transparent dietary information.
Adding a new section for users to get a quick idea of potential options already cuts down so much time from their search.
User Research: What We Actually Found
Going into this, our team honestly thought the biggest challenge would just be the technical side, like how to scrape menu data. We figured people just needed a "Gluten-Free" button and they’d be set. But after sitting down for 1-on-1 interviews with our user population, we realized the problem involves emotional investment alongside a counterintuitive blasé mindset that we didn't expect.
The Invisible Labor:
To start though, the most eye-opening thing we learned was how much "invisible labor" people go through just to grab a casual dinner.
One of our participants told us that if a group of friends suggests a place, he’ll spend 20 minutes deep-diving into Yelp reviews and Instagram photos of menus just to see if he can eat one thing. This is where the biggest problem lies, the time and effort needed just to ascertain if a restaurant is accessible for a person.
Users can end up spending long periods of time just looking for a restaurant or appropriate menu item, making a quick, reliable solution very useful.
Where The App Falls Short
We also saw a major breakdown in trust between the user and the restaurant. We heard stories about the servers saying "I'm pretty sure it's fine" without actually checking with the kitchen. One interviewee actually had an allergic reaction because a server assumed something didn't contain soy. Another pointed out that boba shops commonly don't differentiate ingredients (like milk powder vs. whole milk) in their signage.
Unfortunately there can be fundamental issues residing in the system's method for providing a safe dining experience. Issues that could be partially addressed by having a standard for checking allergens beforehand through an app.
So What Do We Do?
Google Maps does do a lot well, and we don't want to change anything at its core but instead add our features in an intuitive and familiar way. Just like any other filter tab available when searching for restaurants, we create a small block to fit in with the others, aptly titled "Dietary Filter".
When a user clicks on this tab, they're presented with a list of possible options for their dietary restrictions. Through user research, we've discovered that our designs should combine both a square button select for each restriction and categorizations to sort the different types of dietary preferences (e.g. allergies, religious diets, vegetarian). Additionally, while not reflected in our initial designs, the option to save dietary filters as a user profile will be implemented to allow users with consistent preferences to easily recall a filter selection.
Some User Research
Gathering information from users from our population showed some outstanding issues with specifically screens 2 and 3.
Screen 2 changes to be more organized with categories and easier to use with large blocks instead of small sliders.
Screen 3 has more consistent UI and changes its wording to be more clear.
Post - User Research
The blocks were simpler and the categorization helped with finding each option, so the two were combined.
The cross contamination filter’s color was also changed to be black instead of green to indicate not-in-use.
A restaurant may have gluten free items on its menu and therefore appear in the search results. However, that restaurant could qualify simply because it has small food items such as sides or snacks and may not be sufficient enough for a person looking to enjoy a full meal.
After a user inputs their desired filter, Google Maps provides a list of restaurants akin to any other search, but with some additional information we call "Accessible Options" (formerly "Highlights").
These options are a small selection of accessible restaurant food choices to inform the user without having to search directly in the menu, as that would detract from the main purpose of the app design. Within the results screen, a scrolling user can view restaurants and specific menu items to quicken their overall search.
Post - User Research
Changed “Highlights” to “Accessible Options” for better clarity. Removed “Vegetarian" label since it was cluttering. Changed arrow icon to better indicate moving to a new tab and not an external app.
Now if the user still wants to dive deeper into a restaurant by selecting it from the list, they'll find a more extensive list of filtered menu items along with the ability to ask Google's AI more specific questions about the menu. Our design's intent is to reduce how often a user needs to access this tab, but since not every need can be addressed in the previous screens we can scaffold using AI tools.
The Takeaway
Our users do in fact have real concerns about restaurant searching, whether it be as simple as saving some time looking through menus to being confident that the food is safely served. Our design aims to minimize these problems and allow people to search for places to eat quickly and assuredly, having tools to help guide safe and accommodating decision-making.