App for The Living Room Restaurant

Full design for an App for a local restaurant, the Living Room. My role was the entire product design from research to development to testing.

Problem Statement

The Living Room is a very popular restaurant, often booked in advance. Users need a quick and easy way to make reservations, look at the menu, and check dietary information such as allergens, calories, and ingredients. The Living Room also wants to increase their brand recognition and knowledge about the business.

Competitive Analysis

The chief competitor for the Living Room is Crown and Bull, a restaurant nearby serving a very similar clientele. Both restaurants serve modern American cuisine to a largely middle to upper middle group of mainly 25-40 year olds. However I also investigated the sites and apps for several other businesses. Ulele, a more upscale restaurant in a nearby larger city, Caracara a direct competitor in the same city, and The Parlour House Bistro a restaurant serving the same area but that skews a bit older.

I found that the strengths of the competitors lied mostly in Branding, several of the businesses I looked at had sites that were obviously put together meticulously. Specifically Crown and Bull and Caracara. While Ulele focused most on the provenance of the food they serve and their location, and Parlous House on their VIP program. None of the competitors however focused on sharing dietary information about their dishes or even allergens, and only Parlour house offered reservation booking online. In addition, many of the competitors had accessibility issues on their sites such as menus that are in small print and unreadable by screen readers, lack of ALT text, cluttered home pages and broken links. There seems to be a significant gap in the market for a company that is transparent about ingredients and accessible to all.

Pain Points

Currently, if a user with allergies wishes to make a reservation at the Living Room, he or she will need to navigate to the website and look at the menu. The user will only be able to make an educated guess on whether or not certain dishes meet their needs.

The user will then have to make a call to the restaurant in order to book the reservation. This is an issue for people with hearing loss, anxiety, or who just generally prefer not to talk on the phone.

The user will then have to have a long and potentially embarrassing conversation with a server and often also with a manager in order to ascertain whether or not a dish is safe for them to eat.

Research Results

According to the CDC 17.1 percent of US adults are on a special diet, this can include low calorie, gluten free, allergy, etc... and a recent Harris poll found that the majority of Americans have at least one person in their household on a restricted diet 87%. The asthma and allergy foundation of America reports that 32 million Americans live with food allergies. This tells us that understanding the make up of the food we eat is a big consideration for many Americans. And yet, most restaurant menus still contain no or very limited information about what is in the dishes they serve. Many people who suffer from food allergies are in the customer demographics for The Living Room

According to survey data that I collected from American allergy sufferers a majority of them 80% have chosen not to eat at a restaurant because of a lack of allergy information on the menu. 65% reported that they have been made uncomfortable by restaurant staff when trying to obtain allergy information. This is a huge opportunity for The Living Room. Almost none of their competition included a significant amount of allergy and calorie information on their menu.

I also looked into the way that users prefer to make reservations. While it was significantly more mixed than the allergy information, the largest group reported that they prefer to make reservations by online booking form, 47% compared to 36% for by phone and 8% for in person. What this tells us is that it is important for the living room to offer a variety of booking options. There are many reasons why a user may prefer to book online. They may have anxiety like 19.1% of Americans or perhaps they are deaf or have hearing loss like 15% of American adults. Both of these disabilities make scheduling reservations by phone either difficult or impossible.

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Design Solutions

In order to solve for these pain points a number of design solutions were decided on. First, and online booking system was developed to allow for user to schedule a reservation completely online. Then in order to solve for the other two pain points a series of icons were developed for common allergens as well as foods like meat and dairy. The menu is also clickable, when user clicks on a dish they are given a full list of ingredients.

Design Process

Sketching, Storyboarding, and wireframing

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User Flow and Usability Testing

Below is the typical user flow for most of the users tested. Usability testing was completed during the low-fi prototype stage during which some small issues were found and corrected and then again using the high-fi prototype. Users reported the app as being easy to use, straight-forward, and attractive.