Starter
Formerly named Book
MAIN OBJECTIVES
Back to basics
As Book will be our simplest product yet, we went back to the basics of reservation systems to identify the absolute necessities for restaurants that are simply looking to gain more business, but don't want any complicated management features.
PROCESS
Setting the foundation
Our UX researcher kicked off the discovery phase by conducting interviews with customers using Quandoo's existing tool Business Center Free+ — our most basic and affordable tool.
Despite being our simplest tool in the current suite, Free+ requires internal set-up and from Quandoo support team, and contains many complex setting features that not all restaurants require.
The interviews focused on how these restaurants currently handle reservations, and any pain-points they have with the tool. The findings indicated a few key pillars to focus on: affordability, efficiency, and ease of use.
VALUE 01
Increase exposure
The number one value of signing up with Book is the increased exposure. We've found that 87% of people start their dining out experience by using a search engine. By maintianing an online presence and proving quick ways to reserve a table, restaurants can receive more business.
VALUE 02
Plan for the shift
Once reservations come in, they can all be seen in one place. The reservation list is the backbone of the product, helping employees to mentally plan for upcoming shifts.
This list is updated in real-time — if a reservation is cancelled by the restaurant or the guest, this will be indicated in the list.
VALUE 03
Improve guest communication
The reservation detail view contains the more granular bits of information that we acquire via Quandoo's online booking systems.
Any special requests that a guest might make are surface here, and communication with the guest via email or phone call is just a tap away.
VALUE 04
Stay up to date
Things change! In case the phone number or contact person for the Quandoo account needs to change, this can be adjusted simply and quickly -- no support needed.
VALUE 05
Have full autonomy and get listed fast
Unlike all Quandoo legacy products, which require an internal support team to manually set up the account, Starter is self-service sign-up!
It just takes a few minutes to input all necessary information, and after a quick authentication process the restaurant will be listed online and ready to recieve reservations.
PROCESS
Validation
Together with the UX researcher, we met with 5 restaurants in London, and then 5 more in Berlin.
We started with an interview to gather more information such as:
What their role is
Their total capacity and turn-over
What type of technology they use
How they currently receive new reservation notifications
How they currently keep track. of their reservations
Then we asked them to walk through the prototype on a mobile phone. The tasks consisted of:
Creating an account
Adding the website to their home screen (as it's a progressive web app)
View the reservation request that's just come in, and accept it
Check the details for the reservation
Our results indicated that we were on the right track as there were no standout usability issues, and restaurants who have been using pen and paper to keep track of their reservations saw value in using a simplified digital list instead.
THE LAUNCH
We learned
We launched the product as a free tool December 2019 in Australia and Singapore (markets where we had an ongoing acquisition initiative), and later launched in Switzerland and Turkey.
After being live for 2 months:
13 restaurants had successfully claimed their business and created an account
Over 500 had started the account creation process but had not yet finished
64% weekly active users (20-26th Jan); 85% monthly active users Jan (remaining 15% likely to delist)
540+ reservations requests, ~450 accepted, 0 auto-denied, = 100% response rate.
Avg. 23 weekly reservation requests (per merchant who received a request; 20-26th Jan)
Our UX researcher then launched a follow-up qualitative research plan by calling 6 customers around 2 weeks after their first successful log-in.
MOVING FORWARD
We improved
At this point I left the team to start our next new product and another designer took over to work on the next initiatives:
Improve the sign-up flow to reduce drop-off
Adding in a few necessary settings features to control availability and capacity in the simplest way possible
We also identified a few other improvement points:
We need to improve our marketing efforts
While we did launch a website and various campaigns we didn't have as many self-sign ups as we expected. We would need to enhance the entry-point of the funnel if we want to improve this metric.
We need to convince the sales team that self-sign up can work Our sales team is used to their process of selling and onboarding manually. Despite creating a process that's user-friendly and simple enough for the restaurants to do this on their own, the sales team still believes a manual process is the way to go.
We need to continuously improve our tech efforts
Due to the timeline we wanted to launch by, we had to cut some corners technically and were only able to build parts of the product on the new architecture. This will mean we will have to migrate or re-build some flows at some point.