About
📱Project overview
This restaurant reservation app strives to allow users to make a reservation at a restaurant easily. It offers a wide spectrum of restaurants to choose from. The app targets customers like workers, students, and families who makes reservations to go out and eat.
🤔 Problem
Busy worker and students lack the time to wait in line at the restaurant until their queue.
🎯 Goals
Design an app that allows users to easily book a table and go during their time reserved.
💪 My Role
UX designer designing an app for this reservation app from conception to delivery
👩🏻💻 Responsibilities
Conducting interviews, paper and digital wire-framing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
🛠️ Tools
Figma, Adobe Photoshop
⏰ Timeframe
July 2021
User personas
Susan
House-wife
Susan is a house-wife in the capital city of Korea, Seoul. She spends most of her day at home, preparing for meals, or finding places to go out and eat as a family. Susan sometimes encounters difficulties when some restaurants only allow walk-ins, and she’s scared a big family like hers won’t get a table. She would love to explore the new foods her city has to offer!
Lily
Full-time student
Lily is a full time student in her 4th year currently working on her Thesis. This technology makes it much more convenient for her to book a reservation when her parents comes to town, but due to the system, she finds herself spending a lot of time trying to navigate through the app.
User flow
Paper Wireframes
Taking the time to draft iterations for each screen of the app on paper allowed me to come up with a number of different possible solutions based upon my research. This sped up the process and I was able to refine my ultimate choice much more quickly. The stars we used to indicate the elements of each sketch to be included in the initial digital wireframes.
Digital Wireframes
As the initial design phase continued, I made sure to take account the paint points discovered following user research.
Quick, smooth and easy navigation was a key user need to address in the designs.
Low-fidelity prototype
The low-fidelity prototype connected the primary user flow of building and making a reservation, so the prototype could be used in a usability study with users.
Usability study: parameters
Study type
Unmoderated usability study
Participants
5 participants
Location
Thailand; Remote
Length
15 - 25 minutes
Usability study: findings
I conducted two rounds of usability studies. Findings from the first study helped guide the designs from wireframes to mockups. The second study used a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockups needed refining.
Round 1 findings
Round 2 findings
Users wanted to rebook restaurants easily
Users were surprised there’s no confirmation page before booking
Users think having a tab bar would be more convenient
Users mentioned there was no page to see upcoming reservations
Users mentioned there was no option to see how much the deposit was before clicking the reserve button
Mockups
Early designs allowed for reservation history bookings, but after the usability studies, I added upcoming reservations. I also revised the design so users can click to find both their past and upcoming reservations easily.
The second usability study revealed frustration with the reservation flow. I decided to add a “Booking Details” screen before the confirmation screen. I also added the add special request option to this screen.
Design guide
Color Palette
Icons
Typography
Main navigation
Buttons
Takeaways
Impact
What I learned
This app make users feel like the reservation app really thinks about how to meet their needs.
While designing the reservation app, I learned that the first ideas for the app are only the beginning of the process. Usability studies and peer feedback influenced each interaction of the app’s designs.
Next steps
Conduct another round of usability studies to validate whether the pain points user experienced have been effectively addressed.
Conduct more user research to determine new areas of improvement, and listen to feedback to imporve accordingly.
User research: summary
I conducted interviewed and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was families who like to go out and eat.
This user group confirmed initial assumptions about Restaurant reservation app users, but research also revealed that time was not the only factor limiting users from going out to eat. Other user problems included obligations, interests, or challenges that make it difficult to reserve a time slot.
User research: pain points
3 main user pain points I conducted from my interview were:
TIME
Students and working adults are too busy to spend time waiting at a restaurant
ACCESSIBILITY
Some restaurants only allow walk-ins. In addition, platforms for reservation are not equipped with assistive technologies
IA
Text-heavy descriptions in app are often difficult to read and select from