Designing a Table Reservation App
I put together this article as an assignment for a company I was looking to join. They wanted me to design an app that would allow a user to book a table at a restaurant and pre-order food in a convenient and quick way. I decided to keep user research, persona creation, and finding different ways to approach the problem at the fore, while giving the final product lesser importance.
Getting Started
Some constraints:
- The app is intended for an Indian audience, mostly the urban Bangalore audience, since I didn’t want to involve too many different kinds of dining culture in the ideation for the app at this stage.
- Some ideas assume some infrastructure on the part of the restaurants, and piggyback on apps in a related field that already exist
Persona Creation
I conducted a few interviews based on what I thought a user of this app might look like, and created a persona based on my findings.
About Rajiv
- 28 years old
- In a relationship
- Works at a startup in Koramangala
- Holds a B.E in Information Science from one of the best colleges in the country
- Earns well, manages a team, has a demanding job
Rajiv’s Behaviour
- Uses apps like Zomato, BookMyShow, and Flipkart regularly to accomplish tasks faster and more conveniently
- Goes out for lunch or dinner once or twice a week, with colleagues, friends, or significant other
- Is often the one who initiates plans to go out for dinner or drinks, or for team lunches, and makes reservations on behalf of the party, especially for places he’s going to for the first time
- Enjoys eating at the most popular or newest spots in town at prime time slots, when there’s a lot of dinner rush
- Also choses places to eat based on the how long he estimates it will take to drive there, hates Bangalore traffic
- Is disgruntled when he has to wait when he has already made a reservation — “What’s the point of a reservation, then?”
- Takes his team at work out to lunches during the workday and needs to make the most of the limited lunch break, but doesn’t want to compromise on his dining experience or that of his colleagues.
- Will request a change of table if it’s too close to the bathroom, or the kitchen, or if there’s generally a lot of foot traffic near his table
- When asked about what might cause friction during a phone call made to reserve a table, said “Restaurants, even the really good ones, aren’t too concerned about making the reservation process easier, so I’ve had to wait for a long time before I can talk to an actual human.”.††
- To get a restaurant’s number, Rajiv uses Google or more rarely, Zomato, but sometimes the numbers that show up on the web lead to a dead end, and perhaps the second or third number is the correct one.
Observations I made/Pain points I identified:
- One of Rajiv’s main concerns, and pain point is travel time — it often takes an unreasonable amount of time to travel to a restaurant due to traffic, and this is often a deterrent for going out at all.
- What Rajiv hates most about having to pick up the phone and call a restaurant and making a reservation is the wait time to talk to a member of staff at the restaurant, and having multiple incorrect numbers to get through before finding the right one.
- Rajiv finds it annoying to wait even after a reservation has been confirmed because as a customer, he expects to be seated on time, even if the reservation is made during peak hours.
- Rajiv cares a lot about where his party’s table is located within a restaurant — this means it should ideally be away from the bathrooms and the kitchen (or in the case of family restaurants that serve alcohol, away from the bar area), and it matters whether the table is inside or outside, smoking or non-smoking, and not meeting the his requirements leads to frustration.
- Since Rajiv is often pressed for time while booking lunches for his team members or clients/vendors, he would find value in a feature that would allow him to order appetisers for the party before arriving at the restaurant to save time, such that they were served upon arrival, and then peruse the menu to order mains.
Note: Almost of the people I interviewed stated that the experience of looking through the menu at leisure in the restaurant was an important part of the dining experience, and they would probably not use the Preorder feature much, if at all. This is one of the only use cases I found for this feature.
Solutions
Rather than give three different ways to approach the entire problem, I thought a better way to go about it would be to propose different ways to solve each of these pain points.
1. Location, Location, Location
Although we can’t reduce travel time, we can give our users the information to make the best decision for them.
- The first solution is to have a map that you can navigate by pinching/zooming to find restaurants near your location. Distance and ratings are also displayed. Clicking on one of the restaurant cards lets you view more details.
- Restaurants that are close by, and/or highly rated, as well as restaurants that the user has previously made reservations at are displayed on the home screen, while the user can easily search for a restaurant as well.
- Nearby restaurants are made into a collection for easy referencing, and the user can also search.
The reason the app doesn’t let you explore by categories like cuisine, recommended dishes, or curated collections is because it’s intended to be an app that primarily aids the reservation process, and not for exploring. People come here with the express desire to get the table at a restaurant they want, when they want it.
That streamlined flow is also one of the reasons I didn’t want to include a bottom nav — the user doesn’t move back and forth too much, nor are there too many important views to navigate between.
2. Bridging the communication gap
The expected experience when calling a restaurant isn’t the same as calling customer service, and there are a couple of ways to try and avoid that being the case.
- The bulk of the reservation process takes place while searching for the restaurant itself, so that it shortens the navigation by a step.
- Common landing page for 2.3 and 2.4
- 2.3 has a longer form, with all information in long form and a confirm to submit
- You can chat with one of the staff in the restaurant to arrange the reservation instead of calling — this gives the benefit of a written record that you can refer to, as well as being a great way to communicate complex requirements, especially for larger parties.
Removing the human touch, however, is not entirely a good thing, since talking to restaurant staff tends to give Rajiv a sense of security in the fact that his reservation really has been confirmed. Going with the model followed by ticketing apps like BookMyShow, the user is sent an SMS and/or and email confirming booking details, and providing a reference number. Also, they can call the restaurant from the app at any time if they wish to speak to a representative.
3. Waitlisting
After the reservation is made and you’ve arrived, you may still have to wait to be seated— but I think there are ways to incentivise the process.
- Tying up with restaurants means that they can still retain a customer’s business by providing a small discount on their bill if it’s taking a long time to seat them when they arrive. A customer is said to have arrived when their location settings place them at the restaurant around the time of the reservation, or if they manually check in with the concierge.
- I found that among younger people who go to areas in the city where there are a lot of restaurants to choose from, there’s a tendency to check the wait times at places other than the places that a reservation was made. A possible feature to ensure that the user’s party finds the ideal tradeoff between preference and wait time is to make a flash reservation at several nearby places, and see which one is able to seat them the quickest. When one of the restaurants is able to seat the party, the user is notified — the user then confirms the restaurant, and the rest of the bookings are cancelled.
- If the app ties up with restaurants, it can charge a premium for assured immediate seating upon arrival.
4. Location Part II
Sitting right next to the bathroom at a restaurant has the potential to ruin a dining experience, but hopefully, giving users the opportunity to choose their table can help reduce that.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way for users to be able to specify things like “not near bathrooms” or “away from the kitchen” without being indelicate but it’s in the restaurant’s best interest to seat their customers in such areas. I think it’s a step in the right direction to allow users to determine what kind of table they want.
- One way to sort seating is by general location.
- Taking it a step further, for classier joints and special occasions, it might be better to select a table by the ambience it provides.
5. Preordering
The pre-ordering flow was the most straightforward one to me, so I’ve not given options. Alternatives to this flow include:
- Offering appetiser packages according to party size that can be preordered at a discount within the reservation flow, thereby restricting preorders to just a few items, which in turn reduces the number of choices to be made while trying to navigate the complex task of ordering for a group of people
- Allowing preordering for groups above a certain size and giving them the option of creating a more limited, fixed menu that the party can then chose from.
Design of a screen based on the visual design of competitor products
The name of the app, Pax, comes from hotel booking shorthand, where it’s meant to signify the number of persons.
Reading, references and materials used
- Adobe Illustrator
- Resy
- Reserve
- Table8
- Zomato
- Articles on Smashing Magazine
- Articles on Medium.com
- Articles on UXBooth
- Article in TimeOut Magazine
- Research methods adapted from the practices of Alan Cooper and Prof Scott Klemmer, UCSD
- Thanks to Shruthi, Sandesh, Rehain, Suganth, Sujanya, Srinivas, Raaga, Asha and Abhinav for your time and willingness to be interviewed
† The person in the photograph is Vivek Ramaswamy and in real life is not representative of the persona I’ve created.
†† This was a quote from one of my interviewees that I felt expressed the essence of the point that many of the interviewees were trying to make.
