Lets Eat! Jamming together friends on Beli
[1]
What if Beli… had a 'merge' mode for deciding with friends? (๑ᵔ⤙ᵔ๑)
Also an attempt to adjust my design workflow with AI !
Role
UX Designer (personal project)
Tools
Figma, Loveable, Chatgpt, Claude
The Problem
[2]
Picking a place with friends is weirdly hard even when you both already have options saved.
and then you end up getting Chipotle… wasting the potential of trying a new place in the city.
Research
[3]
Most food apps act as if:
“The more options you show, the better the choice.”
But in group decisions:
More options = more negotiation, not more clarity.
People default to the loudest preference instead of the best one.
Not optimizing for choice … but for agreement.
Why this matters
I started by prompting ChatGPT and Claude to help me articulate why this felt like a real problem worth solving -> and kept coming back to the same tension: it's not a discovery problem, it's an agreement problem.
Flow Challenge
[4]
Option 1
Discovery First
Let users browse restaurants
Then help them narrow together
vs
Option 2
Alignment First
Collect preferences up front
Then surface options that match both
I used Claude to pressure-test both directions — prompting it to argue for Discovery First so I could see the strongest case against my instinct. Alignment First still won.
The Journey
[5]
Remember the number of minutes wasted picking a movie for movie night.
I have seen that deciding where to eat is as difficult — different food preferences, dietary restrictions, etc.
Without a full research team, I used Claude to simulate the process — generating personas, mapping pain points, and walking through journey stages.
The biggest pattern it surfaced: the frustration doesn't start at the restaurant. It starts at "so where do you want to go?"
That reframed everything.
AI as Part of My Process
[6]
I used ChatGPT and Claude to pressure-test my thinking — prompting them to argue against my decisions before I committed to them.
I also built a clickable prototype in Lovable early on, which made friction in the flow obvious in a way static frames don't.
Using AI earlier meant fewer surprises later. ₊˚ ⋅
Final Designs
[7]
The final flow focuses on getting to agreement quickly.
Users start a Let’s Eat session inside Beli, invite a friend, and immediately see overlapping saved spots.
Design system reference: Beli's Design System —Nisheta Gupta, Shivani Mehta, Hugo He and Sandra Ye
Reflections
[8]
Hope you enjoyed this quick case study! ₊˚ ⋅ 𓐐𓎩 ‧₊˚ ⋅
I love Beli’s 🍽️₊˚ simplicity and how intentional it is about keeping user journeys short.
Using AI throughout changed my process more than I expected. It replaced the whiteboard conversations I'd usually have with a team… and pushed me to question assumptions earlier.
Designing for alignment instead of discovery changed how I think about group decision flows. (๑ᵔ⤙ᵔ๑)
My beli heheh: beliapp.co/app/souupy
Footer
[9]