Overview

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

After market research and competitors analysis we found that there are a mountain of similar mobile apps, that provide similar functionality, but they all offer complex booking process, buggy solutions or forced sign ins. ResDiary's main idea was to create a Reservations App that would stand out, by creating a great user centric oriented experience and meet users expectations by allowing them to easily find, book and share Restaurants.
The Challenge

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.

Research

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 And Design Stories

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:

Analysis
Our main goal was to create a user experience that will be simple, effective and only provides the information that users would need to book a Restaurant. We created some online surveys and interviewed users in coffee shops or on the train home. We noticed that a lot of the users just wanted to phone a Restaurant or were not aware of the alternatives. This gave us a great insight in finding ways to draw them in to Mobile Reservations, allowing us to create an app to suit their needs.
Persona Development
In order to test our ideas and hypotheses, I created some Personas, to understand possible scenarios and to see which functions could be the most useful. 
User Task Flow
Task flows helped us to think through the design, before any feature is actually developed. It helped us determine the app flow and if the conceptual model align with the user model.
Wireframes
The next step was to visualize the user task flow. I started with some quick sketches, then wireframes and continued on to creating high-fidelity mockups. Since we were going to use the mockups for user validation, we used as much real data as possible.
A/B Testing

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.

Usability Test
Following our A B Testing we noticed the variants were neck and neck in conversion rate (45% - 55%). So when we performed a usability test, we decided to extend our test user base to 10 instead of 5 to see if this behavioural pattern would widen. As predicted we noticed that 60% of users wanted to get instant bookings (bookings today within the next hour) with the Discover feature. Leading us decide that this is the feature that should be front and centre to meet our user needs.