01

Background

Since 2013,  Eatigo have been offering deals to customers to help restaurants to fill unused inventory. Recently Eatigo has extended its services to takeaway deals and coupons.

"It is certainly a win-win situation for restaurant owners and customers. I've been using it for a year and found some issues at times. So I decided to redesign the app so everyone can enjoy a quick foodie fix with a good deal."

02

Competitive Analysis

There are 2 key competitors in the market, Chope and OpenRice. Chope is the direct competitor as it targets the same market with same business goals. While OpenRice started its business as a restaurant review platform and extended its services to table reservation and takeaway deals.

A heuristic analysis was done for the 3 apps so I can have a clearer picture of where Eatigo stands in terms of user experience.

How Eatigo compares with its rivals?

• Search and filter function is confusing while the rest are quite straight-forward
• Groupings / categorization of Eatigo is not as clear as OpenRice

03

Picking up the Pieces

The Big Questions:

1. How people prioritize different factors during the restaurant searching process?
2. What factors affect them make the decision of choosing the restaurant?
3. Are the users able to review the restaurants and make the decision effectively?

Usability Testing & Interviews

I started my research by doing usability test with 3 users, followed up by interviews on their overall experience and asked questions to understand their habits and their dining activities.

Goals:

• To observe how users navigate and uncover any difficulties and pain points while using the app to complete the tasks
• To understand how they search and review restaurants in order to make a reservation

04

Early Insights

All users are able to complete all the tasks (4 tasks in total). They spent much time on reviewing the restaurants & deals. I've collected quite a few issues from the following area:

• Search/Discovery
• Restaurant selection
• Change of bookings
• Purchase of deals/coupons
• Review and rate the restaurant

Prioritization of Issues

I took an extra step of classifying the severity as low, medium, serious or critical by the 3 questions:

1. Does the problem occur on a red route?
2. Is the problem difficult for users to overcome?
3. Is the problem persistent?

05

Narrowing down the Scope

06

Building Empathy

Based on the data from the usability test and interview, I defined the primary user persona. To visualize the steps taken during the process, I've created a task flow. The user journey map is created to help me have a better understanding of the emotional stage of the user at different phase.

The task flow helps me to get a better idea of what are the steps taken to reach the user goals. So when I work on the wireframes, I could ensure that I will not miss out any of them.

The usability test helped me to understand the users' emotion during the process. Users felt frustrated especially when they reviewed the restaurants.

07

Information Architecture

I've done tree testing with 10 participants via Treejack. They had to complete 3 tasks in total. The goal is to test and evaluate the steps taken to reach the following area:

• Booking details
• My Favorites
• Check the menu of the restaurant that has reserved

Result:

The Revision (see revised site map here):

• I decided to rename "My Activities" to "My Reservations" so it will be easier for user to understand and navigate
• Users will be redirected to Restaurant page by clicking the name of the restaurant under "My Reservation"

08

Wireframing the Solutions

Design Goals:

1. Simple the navigation - create fluidity so users can access the content they need easily.
2. Optimize the search experience - support decision moments by better categorization and suggested categories for users
3. Enrich the content - provide users with relevant information with better visual and typographic hierarchy.

I invited the same group of participants to test the low fidelity wireframes.

The Feedback:

• No button to go back after the Restaurant listing being filtered
• Better to add a sorting function for viewing customer reviews
• Difficult to check the opening hours as it is near the bottom of the page

It is a great way to test my assumptions and iterate before I move on to work on the high fidelity wireframes.