ResDiary Now is a beautiful Restaurant Reservations app for booking Restaurants near you. Bookings are made easy with a simple booking process. The user can create a profile and keep track of their history. One of the best features though is Discover, this allows the user to find top rated and popular Restaurants nearby with a table available in the next hour. ResDiary Now is great for booking a Lunch with family or a night out with your friends.
The project began when ResDiary wanted to improve their current iPhone and Android Apps.The Problem
The first challenge in the project was the number of team members. ResDiary Now's team had only one Mobile Developer and myself on Design to prevent slow down of development on their Desktop Reservation System. At that time I was aware that the project would require all of my UI/UX knowledge and I would be involved in the process from the beginning to the very end and it will challenge us both to deliver the user and the business needs.
The second challenge was to work in the small time frame. For instance planning, research, wireframes, design and testing would need to take place within only a few of weeks. This meant it would take a lot of hard work and attention to detail, to deliver a great product.
We managed to stay focused through the research period, by making it short and effective. We gathered as much data as possible from user feedback, technical reports, and usage data etc. We also created a detailed competitor analysis that gave us great insights into current apps and helped us to meet the priorities to differentiate our product from the others. The research phase continued with creating assumptions, that we later validated with surveys and user interviews.
We started to ask questions like who are the users we are targeting, which features would be useful to them, what goals do they need to accomplish and what are the users needs and desires.

Epics are stories that provide an overview of the apps features. They helped me think through my design decisions, to create and provide a useful user experience. In our case, that users can: book, edit, view, share and delete their bookings.
We continued with writing design stories, and using the agile methodology to capture the functionality of the product. We created detailed descriptions of what the user can do.
Our design stories:




Watching our test users interact and stumble through our product, we quickly identified areas where the app was not easy to use. Simplicity and ease of use were our top priority from day one and this filtered into every wireframe and piece of copy. Constantly asking Is it simple enough? Is there anything we could simplify?
We created two versions of our product, one leading through a typical Reservations App Process (Left, Variant 1) and another (Right, Variant 2) Testing if immediacy was more important to a user.

