Allset: Initial Thoughts on the App for Dining Out On-Demand
What I liked and what would be great to see
Based on my Android app experience.
This has happened to many of us in some form: the team wants to go out for lunch, but one team member is on a call until 12 and another has a meeting at 1 sharp. This realistically leaves 45 minutes to pick a place, wait for a table, order food, eat the food, then split the bill and pay. After weighing all options, the team gives up and trudges over to the usual deli place (second time this week) for the usual turkey brie on dutch crunch.
In comes Allset, an app where users can reserve a table, select their dish in advance, and pay in advance so they can get in, eat, and get out quickly and conveniently. Allset aims to give customers the sit-down experience at a restaurant while drastically reducing the time between walking in and walking out.
I’ve only used the app once as of writing this, but had a very enjoyable experience (shout out to Yemeni’s in San Francisco for a good Shawerma Beef dish). I made a 12pm reservation, arrived 11:56am, was seated immediately, and had my plate in front me by 12:03pm. After finishing my dish (and double-checking my payment with the staff), I just got up and left.
This isn’t meant to be a review or an in-depth look (shameless plug: use my referral code for $10 credit if you feel compelled to try the app after reading this: “ROTO30”). After exploring the app and using it once, I have a few initial thoughts on what I liked and what would be great to see.
What I Liked
As mentioned earlier, the app can take care of just about everything you do inside a restaurant aside from actually eating your food. Setting my table details, finding my restaurant, selecting my dish, and confirming my order was easy, smooth, and first time user friendly.
Allset also allows users to get directions to the restaurant and redirects users to Google Maps with the address of the restaurant as the destination. If location access was granted, the directions are already shown from their current location to the restaurant.
Lastly, and while not a new concept, I appreciated the fact that one of Allset’s methods of user base growth is the referral code, which rewards both the sharing users and new users with a $10 credit. This reminded me of the referral code system from Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, and Postmates, all of which I still regularly use today.
One cool feature that I haven’t tried yet is the ability to split the bill with friends. I’ll update this article if and when I get the chance to try it, but wanted to mention that the feature is there.
What Would be Great to See
Allset fills the gap left by food delivery and table reservation services by combining the on-demand food experience from Postmates and Uber Eats with the tables reservation experience of OpenTable. For me, these are the three apps competing for screen time with Allset whenever I ask myself “What should I eat?” before deciding whether to dine out or have food delivered. I regularly use the other three apps and based on my experience, have some suggestions for Allset.
As a user, I would like to search by name or cuisine so I can quickly find and select a restaurant.
Currently, there are no options to search by restaurant name or filter for specific cuisines. Users must either scroll through a list of restaurants ordered by closest distance, or adjust the map and redo searches by area. This makes it tougher to discover restaurants and adds search time by forcing users to either scroll through a myriad of restaurants or click on every single pin drop on the map search. Compared to the other apps, Allset doesn’t have as many restaurants to choose from yet so this isn’t a deal breaker. But as the number of partners grows, I would hope this is added soon to see the search feature on par with Uber Eats, Postmates, and OpenTable.
Back in my public accounting days, my teams would switch up lunch (and dinner) cuisines based on the day of the week (and client). I also occasionally get burrito cravings and am on a personal quest to discover the best non-Mission burrito in San Francisco (feel free to leave recs in the comments!). Having the ability to search by name and cuisine would not only promote variety for team lunches and more quickly satisfy my burrito cravings, but also drastically improve users’ restaurant discovery and selection experiences. Updating the search feature can have a positive impact on the retention of users who love what Allset does but can only find the restaurants or cuisines they’re looking for elsewhere.
As a user, I want to see and leave restaurant ratings so I can make informed dining decisions.
When selecting restaurants, I don’t want to open another app to see how well a restaurant is rated, especially since ratings play a role in how many diners decide where to eat. Uber Eats and Postmates don’t carry ratings either, but I can let this go because users are subject only to the food and not the entire dining experience (noise level, service, ambiance, etc.) However, OpenTable does carry user ratings, in addition to other user-sourced content like photos, eliminating the need for users to leave the app to do restaurant research.
Maybe this is by design, as the on-demand experience focuses on solving an immediate problem as quickly and conveniently as possible and sitting down to leave a long, detailed review goes against this. A quick rating feature that I like is in Uber, where users leave a rating out of 5 and add details on what went well and takes only seconds to complete.
If implemented in Allset, this would allow users to stay in the app for restaurant ratings and hopefully improve user engagement. This would also provide restaurants with customer data actionable feedback on how they can improve their patrons’ dining experience, benefiting its partners and making itself more favorable to potential partners. Allset currently does ask for feedback, but I believe this is more for Allset’s use instead of for users and restaurants. I created a mockup of what I envisioned for Allset’s quick rating feature.
Having a restaurant rating system built into the app could be beneficial to all parties: users, restaurants, and Allset. Additionally, research shows that people attach more value to their own work, so asking users to invest their time into rating their experiences (and perhaps rewarding those users down the road) could be beneficial for user engagement and retention.
As someone who consumes content primarily on a mobile platform, I would like vertical scrolling because horizontal swiping outside of switching panel views feels unfamiliar.
Ok, maybe I’m just picking nits here. But swiping horizontally in Allset to update table details just felt weird. At the very least, it was noticeable — it took a significant number of horizontal swipes to get from a 7:30am to 12pm reservation. I like OpenTable’s design for finding tables, since not only does vertical scrolling take less effort and is more familiar to users than horizontal swiping, but being able to update all the table details in one window instead of each detail individually reduces time and effort required on the user’s part.
Using gestures that are more familiar to users instead of forcing them to learn a new gesture can make the use of the app more natural and intuitive. This is vital when competing with other established apps and services for phone storage and screen time.
Other observations:
- Some restaurants have pictures for their dishes while others do not. Having pictures helps when choosing what to order.
- Some items on the menu in the restaurant were left off the Allset menu. In my case, there were no chicken dishes for Yemeni’s in the Allset menu while the in-restaurant menu had a chicken section.
- When changing panel views (for example, switching from list search to map search), there’s a slight wait time for page loading, noted by a blinking Allset logo before disappearing after about a second. Not too big of a deal, but it would be great to see smoother in-app navigation with barely noticeable to no wait time in the future.
- When switching to the map search view after opening the app, the map starts on Africa before zooming all the way to San Francisco. While I personally find this amusing, it does take an extra couple of seconds before I can start using the map search feature.
Closing
Overall, I enjoyed using this app and am excited for what the future holds. As Allset gains more partners and more options become available for users, I’m sure I’ll be regularly checking to see where I can try my next burrito.
Have you tried Allset yet? Give this article a rec and leave a comment below!
