Dine Hub: A UX Case Study on Enhancing Food Delivery, Booking, and Collection
This project focuses on redesigning and rebranding the ReserveOut — restaurant booking app and transforming it into Dine Hub, a unified platform for restaurant reservations, food delivery, and order collection. The Research contains qualitative and quantitative user research methods, usability testing and a final prototype.
Background and Motivation
Mobile apps have become essential for discovering restaurants, making reservations, and reading reviews. Consequently, the demand for recommendation and reservation service apps has grown, with new features constantly being added to meet evolving user needs. Online reservations offer key benefits to customers, such as greater convenience, control, and reliability, creating a seamless and consistent experience. The rise of mobile app markets has enabled people to access relevant restaurant information more efficiently than ever, making it more straightforward to manage time and finances by providing on-demand access to desired information.
The purpose of this study is to identify and understand the main pain points users face when using the ReserveOut app, particularly those affecting user experience and customer loyalty. To achieve this, my team and I will conduct usability testing to trace the user's journey through the app and identify challenges in the reservation process.
Project Objectives
The project objectives are to understand how users make reservations on the app, discover how customers find new restaurants, determine the best features for a booking platform, analyze customer actions during reservations, explore competitor apps for bookings and delivery, and evaluate pain points experienced while using the app.
We also created a team charter to define our goals, roles, and responsibilities, ensuring clear communication and alignment throughout the project. This charter helped set expectations, establish collaboration guidelines, and streamline team decision-making processes.
Empathize
During the empathize phase, we explored users' feelings about the product, including their frustrations and motivations. While conducting user interviews, I focused on fostering open conversations and asking open-ended questions. I remained neutral and unbiased to maintain the integrity of the interviews. I aimed to understand participants' work environments, everyday struggles, pain points, and how our target audience could benefit from the product and its features. When creating survey questions, I aimed to ask the right questions to gather valuable data on users' motivations, frustrations, and preferences. Throughout this stage, I learned to observe and take notes on user insights while setting aside my biases.
Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluations measure the usability of user interfaces and provide insights to enhance product usability early in development. I chose to conduct a heuristic evaluation to improve the UI and usability.
The app excels in visibility, informing users about their actions, especially during table booking. It displays messages like "We found you a table," "Reserve now," and "Completed." If users make a mistake while booking, they have easy options to cancel or edit their reservations. The edit option is beneficial, allowing users to change the reservation time or the number of guests when needed.
While the reservation process is straightforward, it could be improved with a pop-up asking, "Are you sure you want to proceed with the reservation?" The app also provides clear error messages that explain problems and offer solutions. For instance, if the password doesn't meet the requirements during registration, the app identifies the issue and shows an exclamation point for any empty fields.
The app uses consistent language and presents information in a friendly manner. Essential actions and options are easily accessible through a dropdown menu. While search features like sorting and filtering are located at the bottom of the page and are accessible while scrolling, they may not be noticeable enough for first-time users. Overall, the interface is clean and straightforward, allowing users to navigate the app without registering first.
Competitor & Inspiration Analysis
Through competitor analysis, I identified several key features for food reservation and delivery platforms. I assessed each competitor's business size, product offerings, unique value proposition, UX, first impressions, and accessibility features. This comparison provided insights into the features users expect from a restaurant service app.
What to avoid
- Lacking help or about page
- Only one search filter option
- The menu not showing on the app
What's the best practice
- Developed search filter and sort by, with many options suited for every need
- Navigation with pictures
- Allergen info
- Opening times
- Estimated delivery time
- Dress code
- Price range
- List of features like wheelchair and high chair accessible, street parking
How Might We & Stakeholders Map
During our brainstorming session as a team, we conducted a How Might We (HMW) exercise, which helped us ask key questions and explore possible solutions for our product. This approach allowed us to generate various ideas and select a few of the best to guide our research. Additionally, we created a list of stakeholders to help define our target audience for personas, user interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
User Survey
To gather qualitative data and user insights, we tailored our survey questions to identify users' pain points and the issues they face with restaurant reservations and food delivery platforms. The survey consists of 22 questions divided into categories that correspond to different parts of the app. We start by asking about participants' age and how often they dine out, make reservations, order delivery, and pick up food. This section helps us gauge the demand for our product and how integrated these services are in their daily lives.
The next section focuses on restaurant reservations, exploring how participants book tables, which devices they use, and their overall satisfaction with online booking. We also ask about food delivery to identify the most popular competitor apps and whether users prefer restaurants that offer delivery.
Additionally, we inquire about food allergies, dietary restrictions, waiting times for tables, venue preferences like live music or crowded settings, and any information existing apps might lack but users would like to see. These questions aim to address users' preferences and accessibility needs.
Objectives
- Find out how customers discover new restaurants
- Determine how they prefer to make a reservation
- Determine the best features for a booking platform
- Learn about competitor apps customers are using to book reservations and get food delivery
Schedule
- We created a detailed schedule to keep our survey process smooth, organized, and on schedule.
Results
An in-depth analysis of 76 responses reveals the following:
Finding a new restaurant: Our participants answered they would most likely find a new restaurant through friends and family recommendations (64%), with social media being a close second choice (54%). These statistics tell us that we put a value on the opinions of those around us and our peers. Our redesign would greatly benefit from a rating and review section, with the option to share on social media.
User demand for a booking app in the market is evident: although most participants (66%) have never used an app to make a restaurant reservation, a majority (48%) indicated a booking app as their preferred reservation method, with restaurant websites coming in second (46%). These findings highlight a clear need for a widely accessible restaurant booking service. Current mobile booking apps are either less well-known or cater to narrow audiences, often limited to specific regions. If given the option, users would prefer the quick and convenient experience of booking through an app.
User Interview
To better understand our target audience, I conducted a user interview to gather qualitative data on users' pain points, aiming to improve the overall user experience. The objective was to explore how a professional event planner might benefit from our app. The participant was a 25-year-old woman working in a travel agency that organizes congress events. We met in her office for a one-on-one, in-depth interview. I prepared questions designed to make the participant comfortable and engaged while allowing me to collect valuable data for the study. I stayed neutral and unbiased to maintain interview integrity, focusing on understanding her work, daily challenges, needs, and how our target audience could benefit from the app's features.
Objectives
- Identify what motivates people to make a restaurant reservation
- Determine what challenges people face while using booking platforms
- Understand how to make the experience easier
Target Audience
- Age 18–45
- Metropolitan area
- People who often eat out
- People who enjoy going to restaurants
- People who own restaurants
- People who make restaurant reservations as part of their job
Define
I focused on clearly defining the problem to guide effective solutions in the product redesign. Creating user-focused problem statements centred on users' needs and motivations directed me toward possible design solutions. By developing a fictional persona and scenario, I gained a better understanding of real users' potential needs. This deeper insight into user behaviour helped me define essential aspects of my persona and allowed me to identify and prioritize the best features and practices for the redesign.
Persona
My primary persona is Maya Young, an ambitious woman working as a personal assistant. Her goals are to impress her boss and earn a promotion while also carving out free time for nights out with friends. Her frustrations include long wait times for tables, limited vegetarian options, and information on allergens. Moving forward, I will use this persona to understand the target audience better and identify users' pain points.
Scenario
The scenario provides a brief description of the user and their core need. It's kept short and direct to give an immediate understanding of what we aim to achieve with our product. I created this scenario as a reminder to keep the user at the centre of the design, ensuring that every development step directly contributes to meeting the user's goals.
Empathy Map
The objective of my empathy map is to capture the experience of booking a restaurant reservation. I gained a clearer understanding of the thought process behind making reservations. This exercise highlighted the typical approach users take and the pain points they encounter, helping me address these issues and find solutions for the app redesign.
Problem Statement
Using my persona, I wrote a problem statement that provided a clear description of the problem while keeping the focus on the user, their situation, motivation and expected outcome.
Ideate
While considering everything we have uncovered in user research, in the next phase, I will focus on brainstorming possible ideas for design solutions.
Customer Journey Map
In the journey map, I focused on what my persona was doing, thinking, feeling, and their frustrations. The part I want to draw attention to is the opportunities section, where I explored potential solutions to our user's pain points.
Hierarchical Task Analysis
I analyzed the tasks and subtasks users need to perform to achieve certain goals, like making a restaurant reservation.
Key Insights & Design Ideas
From a research perspective, the ReserveOut app requires an in-depth redesign approach to make it more user-friendly and accessible. The new system will allow users to quickly and easily find the information they need by selecting information that meets their needs and preferences.
Prototyping
User Journey Sketch
Using hierarchical task analysis, I sketched out possible design solutions for each task.
Paper Prototype
In the paper prototype, I explored and compared different solutions for a list of venues, frontpage, homepage and search filter & sort by filter.
Digital Prototype
Considering all research insights, I translated them into early concepts of a digital Figma prototype. Starting from the homepage, list of venues, booking a table parameters and search filter.
Testing
Usability testing — Existing App
The following usability testing method involves testing and monitoring user behaviour as they interact with the product and complete specific tasks. The main benefit and purpose of this usability testing is to see how real users interact with the product, what problems they face and their thinking process. For this purpose, I encouraged the participants to talk aloud, describing their steps, reasoning, experience and frustrations.
Task: use ReserveOut to book a reservation in a vegetarian restaurant this Saturday at 7:30 PM
Completion times: 95% of the user task completion times were between 20 seconds and 130 seconds.
63.95% of the users will make a reservation within 85 seconds or less, and 36.05% will require more than 85 seconds.
Overall relative efficiency is 57%.
Usability Testing — Prototype
We also conducted usability testing for our digital prototype to test the functionality of features and tasks. We prepared the test script, consent form and SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaire. By asking participants to do certain tasks, we were able to gather data, pinpoint flaws in the prototype, and make notes on improvements.
Final Prototype
Based on our usability findings, we designed a new and improved prototype with additional features such as an interactive map, reservation editing, and an account profile page. The final result is an interactive digital prototype for booking table reservations, designed by me, along with the food delivery ordering feature developed by my team member.
Conclusion and Reflection
Online food ordering platforms have grown in popularity and have transformed the restaurant industry. These services provide new opportunities, making food ordering easier and more accessible while changing how restaurants operate. Although many platforms offer these services, they typically focus on one aspect and are limited to specific areas. Through the Dine Hub app, we created a platform that combines these features with an advanced search and filter system to enhance search performance through personalization. The new personalized recommendation system will increase user satisfaction and foster customer loyalty.
Results and Impact
The biggest impact on my prototype and final design was the user research techniques like user surveys and interviews, and even more so, the usability testing. By testing the original app and our digital prototype, I was able to focus on human-centred design and create a solution that users love. This approach helped me design with the user in mind and minimize the influence of my own biases on the product.
Main Challenge and Lesson Learnt
The digital prototype didn't fully start to take shape until we used Figma's digital component library, which allowed us to create consistent UI through the prototype. Another important impact on the design was a list of insights and design ideas, in which I reflected on conducted research to extract the most important ideas and observations before starting the digital prototype. This way, I could design for the user and consider the relevant findings, which I would then use to shape the digital product.
