A hospitality technology platform that powers restaurants around the world and a consumer-facing reservation platform for diners.
According to the New York Times, the average couple or group goes out to eat four times a month and tries a new restaurant at least once a month. Roughly, 2 hours and 32 minutes a week are spent negotiating on where to eat. Resy saw this as a great opportunity to help their users decide on a place to eat where all opinions are heard anonymously.
Create a polling system where a user can send a poll to their party so that each individual can enter their own preferences/options and later on vote on a place to eat at.
VIEW FINAL PROTOTYPEI conducted two folds of research, user interviews and a competitive analysis with other companies in the problem space. I started with user interviews to identify user problems and any noticeable trends. A competitive analysis was then conducted to analyze other possible competitors that offer a similar service and identify any patterns or trends.
I organized virtual user interviews with 5 participants who had past experiences with planning to go out to eat. Here are some of my findings.
Several users expressed their frustration when planning to go out to eat with their friends. When offering places to eat, their friends won't weigh in on any option and just go with whatever choice the host has. In other cases, they have friends who just want to please everyone and just go along with the first mentioned option so as to not be judged or hurt anyone's feelings.
"Everyone is super passive so they just downplay things. Like I would send them options and someone else would too. And no one responds. I message them all again in our chat and then they just end up picking the first yelp link I send to them. Sometimes they're like I don't care or just shy and then complain later about it." - Female, 25
In some cases, especially with larger parties of 6+, participants mentioned that large groups tend to break into smaller ones. This occurs because each person is trying to find an option, but what ends up happening is that the individual has a smaller discussion with another and doesn't let the entire group know. Wasting more time in the decision making process.
"So it’s like one person has the menu on their phone and shares, but then another person is looking at pics with another on theirs. And then we're having conversations in smaller groups and not really talking as a whole. It’s just hard to share all these details with everyone" - Male, 25
A common frustration amongst all participants was the case of sharing Yelp links in their group chat. For example, one person would send 4 places to eat at, but because people tended to scroll and miss it, their friends would just pick the first/most recent one they see. Users stated that information easily gets lost when this happens.
"It’s also hard to share all the information regarding different places to eat at. Some applications don’t even allow me to send to others as a list. I would have to screenshot the place or sharing multiple links with them and then people would forget about it and later on just pick the most recent option" - Female, 25
Users mentioned the use of polls at work to help them decide on a place to eat. By having one individual create a poll and have one person decide all the places or have each person decide on a place and pick, usually all participants are happy with the end choice.
"We just do a quick poll with all the options and majority wins. No one ever is opposed to the majority after the poll so it all works out." - Male, 24
With the rise of the pandemic, these applications have risen to popularity because of the need to do reservations instead of walk-ins to avoid health risk. Below I listed the strengths and weaknesses between each of the services, which will later help inform my design decisions.
From the user interviews, I reviewed the major needs, motivations, and pain points of the participants. I saw that there was a frustration when collaborating on a place especially because people were shy in voicing their opinion, but also it was hard to put all options into one place. I created a How Might We statement based on these.
After crafting my problem statement, I generated various solutions that would resolve the needs of the users. Using the Crazy 8's method, I was able to interpret my ideas and generate different solutions. Below is one of the rounds of Crazy 8's:
Looking back on my ideas, I created a storyboard showcase the strongest idea, as well as some of the others. The storyboard below depicts the host creating a poll and sending it out to their contacts where they can all enter their options and vote anonymously.
I used the data from the user interviews to create a persona, Freddie Liu, to represent a part of our target users. By creating a fictional persona, I was able to personify the needs and wants of the target users into a single person. Freddie is a young adult professional that wants to have fun on the weekends with his friends, but doesn't want to waste time arguing or staying silent about deciding where to eat.
Next, I created some user flows with those pages that Freddie would take to complete his goal of going to eat with his friends. I kept iterating my user flows because as the design progressed, I realized that there were more pages that need to be created for a complete experience. The primary flow was then broken down into 3 sub user flows that the user would take to complete their task. These include:
Using the storyboard as a rough sketch, I started building out key pages from the user flow. Based on the user research, most Resy users are using the mobile application to book reservations. And for this reason the wireframes will be of the mobile application. My goal for the design was to make it easy and simple to set up.
After completing the mid-fidelity wireframes, I did a round of usability testing. Changes were made to accommodate the major issues expressed by users with the current design. Issues included:
Because this project is an added feature, I decided to keep true to Resy's Brand Guidelines. Keeping their signature red-orange color with their contrasting blues. The application is in dark mode following iOS Guidelines for mobile applications. For fonts, Resy uses a unique font which I wasn't able to access so I used GT America.
Building off of the mid-fidelity wireframe and using the style guide, I built the high-fidelity wireframes.
After creating the high-fidelity design, I wanted to test the design with another round of usability testing. I wanted to test the new adjustments I made to various parts of the design and to make sure there aren't any confusion or struggles throughout the process. I gathered 5 users to test the prototype through Zoom. I had them perform three tasks:
There was a 100% completion rate, all participants were able to successfully create a poll and share it with their friends. The users were also able to enter their preferences, restaurant of choice, vote and book a reservation for the winning restaurant. However, there were changes to be made based on the usability testing. Below, I detail out each one.
All participants were confused on the choice of icon design, it reminded them more of cell service rather than a poll. Based on the feedback, they felt that the icon should look something like the voting system that is being used. I then created an icon that's more known as a ballot icon. With the new icon users found the change to click on it to create a poll more intuitive.
"I don't really know how I feel about the new icon for the polling feature. It reminds me too much of a statistical graph or cell service rather than the voting that we do." - Male, 24
Resy's current application uses the blue CTA as the main active CTA when making reservations. However, when entering their allergies/restrictions, the CTA is either grey with "None, continue" and white with "Continue" as both active. Users were left unsure whether they could click the grey CTA without having to choose an option. To resolve this problem, I made all active CTAs blue and all inactive states grey. I also included a "None" option so that users can tap on that and then the CTA becomes active.
"The CTAs are confusing because I saw both blue, grey, and white being used as active? I'm so used to seeing when we have to add information for buttons to have both an inactive and active state. When I saw the grey button, I thought I had to click on option, but didn't see a 'none'" - Female, 24
The first concern for the party preferences layout is that we are viewing the user's preferences first over the party's. However, because it's called party preferences, we want to see the party's responses. To resolve this, I switched the order.
The second concern is how we are viewing the information. Originally, I had it where you were able to see the anonymous responses of each individual. However, users brought up the situation where we have a larger party (i.e. 20 people). It would be frustrating for the user to view each person's response and count the number of times they said a particular preferred cuisine/allergy/additional requests. To resolve this, I made it so that to the right of the option name, we have the number of responses people gave to that similar answer. This allows the user to quickly identify the preferences of the entire party as a whole and make the decision on what option they should add or vote on.
"I like that we are able to see what the party wants without knowing who they are, however, I feel like their could be a better way to show it. Cause what happens if I had a party of 20 people? I don't really want to scroll through each one and have to pull out a piece of paper to count what people put." - Female, 25
VIEW FINAL PROTOTYPEIt was a fun challenge designing with the constraints of an existing application such as Resy. The most important thing I learned from this project is the need to not build a feature with something that I would want, but rather a feature for a bigger problem that affects a bigger population. I enjoyed spending the time to do the research for this project and discovering a pain point that was almost overlooked. I also learned that usability testing at every stage of building is important. It allowed me to iterate and correct any issues in the early stages. I was glad to create a new feature for an application I used on my travels and hope that it does become real one day so that people can stop wasting time and just eat.
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}