Open Table Strengthens Trust in the Review Experience
Open Table is an app that enables users to book reservations at restaurants. The goal of this case study was to increase bookings by building user trust in the review process. My partner Bettina Francisco and I implemented product strategies, ideation techniques, created lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes to reach this goal.
Role
User Research
Product Strategy
UI Design
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
Tools
Figjam
Notion
Maze
Figma
Timeline
5 weeks
The Problem
Open Table is facing user distrust in the review experience. Currently, the reviews are lacking engagement opportunities and visual intrigue.
The Solution
We believe by including user profiles and adding friends to follow and interact with will help get users excited about booking through Open Table. Our friends are the first people we go to for recommendations, so let's include them in this experience!
Usability Review
Auditing the current product allowed us to identify "wow moments" and "pain points". When we empathized with the user to understand the friction points that need to be reduced for prime usability.
User frustrations
Reviews are cluttered with text, the restaurant information for reviews is not clickable, and the thumbs up/down feature for reviews is limiting and outdated.
Primary Pain Point
When users want to interact with a review they are only able to provide feedback to the product - not real people - the lack of personal connection results in distrust for the review experience.
Secondary Pain Point
When users want to access reviews they have to scroll through text and move through multiple screens. This produces disinterest in referring to reviews for booking decisions.
Competitor Benchmarking
We moved on to competitor benchmarking to identify standards and solutions from both indirect and direct competitors that might be used to improve the existing experience. We focused on six key metrics to help draw unique comparisons and insights from competitors: strengths, weaknesses, ux, design, content, and opportunities.
Direct Competitor - Resy
Strengths: Simple scannable design, strong branding, accessibility points for dark mode
Weaknesses: Unclear access to review section
Indirect Competitor - Air BnB
Strengths: Intuitive UX, functional design, visually appealing carousel to
display reviews
Weaknesses: Review information is unclear - doesn’t display review stars
Problem Space
The reviews are not prioritized in the user flow, they feel impersonal and disconnected. Open Table is missing opportunities for more engagement and excitement in the review experience.
How Might We… strengthen trust in the review experience to increase bookings through Open Table.
Ideation
Once we identified our problem - an impersonal review experience - we began to ideate solutions with a few different techniques.
Mind Map: An Organized collaborative approach, brainstorming what we can add to the experience and how we can improve upon the current design
Crazy Eights: Visual ideation with time constraints (8 ideas, 1 minute sketching each idea). This helps to loosen up and expand on what we came up in our mind map.
Priority Matrix: Picking our favorite solutions, we inputted them into a FigJam plugin to calculate the impact to effort ratio.
What can we add
Commenting features and user profiles will allow users to engage with other reviewers; seeing patron responses to reviews may help a user to build confidence in the validity of a review as well as enjoy connecting with friends.
What can we improve
Iterating the review display into a carousel, user avatars with photos, and bumping up review access in the user flow could highlight the importance of reviews and improve user attitudes toward the experience.
User Flows
Current Flow: By mapping the current flow we could see what works well, the pain points, and how we could integrate our design ideas.
Improved Flow: With this new flow we visualized the functionality of our design ideas. Our goal was to give the user options for new experiences, without disrupting the current flow returning users are accustomed to. We determined it would be intuitive for users to be prompted to “connect with contacts” after logging in, provided another avenue to find reviews, implemented clickable avatars navigating to users profiles, and added on a commenting flow.
Rapid Prototyping
Using Figjam we sketched our ideas in a low fidelity prototype. Wireframing allowed us to see how our solutions would be applied, with low stakes. We used this stage to annotate the components to be built and to envision the user flow from another perspective. This prepared us nicely for designing and prototyping.
Styles & Components
By making component sets easily accessible in the assets tab we could reuse, edit, and create boolean properties to toggle design elements on and off for components serving multiple functions in our design. We chose to maintain Open Table's current styles for branding consistency, because we didn't see a need for our solutions.
High Fidelity Prototype
Our hi-fi prototype took on many iterations. As we began designing we discovered some of our solutions were “half-baked” and needed to be more thoroughly explored to avoid errors and create a smoother user experience. We were able to back track and re-work our wireframes to reflect the components and design styles needed for this project, as well as produce a functional and learnable flow.
Usability Testing
Utilizing the platform Maze we conducted unmoderated usability tests; evaluating learnability, efficiency, errors, and user satisfaction. In order to keep our testing to three phases (“Add Friends”, “Navigate to Friend Review”, “Leave a Comment”) and due to time constraints we removed user profiles from the test. Within each phase we instructed users with a scenario and task, followed by open-ended questions to gather feedback on the process.
Test outcomes
Having tested the prototype, I learned users were excited to eat out after completing our experience which should improve bookings and reach our goal! Users faced pain points when trying to "navigate to a friend review", thinking there would be a nav item to initiate this request. This is something we could consider for future updates.
Three key learnings
1. Thorough ideation makes for a fleshed out design. We discovered many missed details when working on the hi-fi prototype. Taking more time to consider the implications of our solutions at the lo-fi stage could save us from a headache later on.
2. Don’t underestimate enjoyability! Engaging users in a fun feature elicits excitement for using the product.
3. Always give users options when creating entirely new experiences. Some users won't be interested in connecting with friends, it's important that the improvements we make include those user segments and don't create more friction for returning users.
Next steps
After conducting our usability test, the next step is to test the user experience with profile pages included in the design. If this project were to continue, we may conduct user interviews for more thorough feedback, audit a competitor with social features similar to our design - like Yelp - and ideate with another mind map.