Design at OpenTable
A welcome note for our new publication.
Hello. Thanks for stopping by.
As a company, OpenTable will be twenty years old in 2018. So-long, teen-age! Over the course of those years, we have developed into a stable, healthy business.
As we’ve matured, we find ourselves with new beginnings — we have the opportunity to figure out what design means for our products and services and how they derive value from the expertise and focus our design team brings to both the organization and our users.
Five short years ago, the OpenTable design team didn’t exist. And, thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, we’re now a team of thirty, which includes researchers, writers, interaction designers, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, engineers, and some, frankly pretty amazing, bakers.
Our team works at the intersection of two of today’s most culturally significant industries — technology and food — inhabiting the relationship at the heart of our business, between restaurants and diners.
The products and services we make help restaurants run, grow and thrive. When restaurants are successful, so are the communities in which they exist. The history of restaurant culture is rooted in opportunism — so many restaurants are started by people who might not otherwise have had access to the same resources to start a business of their own.
Very few smart restaurateurs open a restaurant to make money. That’s not why you do it. In New York alone, one in two restaurants fail a few months into business, so let’s just say the odds are, by definition, not in your favor. Some might even call you crazy. But you do it because you love cooking for people. Food, in this sense, is a form of communication, a shared history, a way of transcending cultural boundaries. It is the fabric of who we are just as restaurants are the fabric of their communities.
And on the other side of the relationship, for diners, we aim to provide a way for people to easily access and experience these cultures and communities through food.
We know there’s so much more that we can do to both support budding restaurateurs and reflect the richness of the culture and conversation around food and dining in our brand and product experience, and the team is full of ideas on how we do that. Watch this space.
I’ve encouraged the team to use this publication as an open platform to which they can publish whatever they wish. There are many voices within the team, and they all have something to say — here is a place for them to say it. Some things might be directly related to the products we make for diners and restaurants, while some might be thoughts about design in general, or advice for aspiring designers beginning to find their way in our industry, or something entirely different and more about food culture in general. The intent is to provide an insight into not only how we go about our work, but what motivates, inspires and keeps us interested too.
We hope there’s something here that you find interesting, and we look forward to continuing to share the work that happens around our table. Pull up a chair.
