Funsize Case Study: TableHero
Designing A Modern Restaurant Reservation System.
Way back in 2014… Deap Ubhi, the Founder and CEO of TableHero is a veteran product executive, investor, and start-up mentor. He also comes from a family who has owned and operated a restaurant just outside of San Francisco for almost 30 years. His concept for TableHero was to create an iPad solution that was simple to set up, easy to use, and costs a simple monthly fee that allows restaurants to manage to their restaurant and customers.
1. Just Enough Research
Deap grew up in the family business and still helps his family at the restaurant from time to time. He’s been through the process of searching for a front of house reservation system and knew the challenges, competition, and had a clear, passionate vision.
“Our target customer is a restaurant owner who manages a full service dining room and restaurant of any size, although the statistics overwhelmingly favor mom and pop establishments. Having that said, we want to be able to take our solution to a PF Changs and Mom’s Chicken and Grits.”
Next, we spent some time quickly visiting other restaurants to gain a deeper understanding of the front of house, job functions, and user needs. They’re constantly balancing walk-ups, online reservations, phone reservations, custom seating, VIPs, and seating changes — it’s a hard job.
2. iPad Reservation Application
The iPad Reservation Application is the core foundational product from TableHero, aimed at providing a fast, delightful, and effective reservation experience for small restaurants and front of house staff. The plan at large was to design the iPad application first in order to influence the entire TableHero Service Design, Brand, and Digital Products.
Crafting the User Experience
The first and most critical user experience challenges to tackle were:
- Design a dead simple onboarding, restaurant set-up, and table layout configurator that even the most low-tech owners could use.
- Design the best reservation creation experience and reservation ledger that could support current time, daily and monthly high-level views.
- Be easier to use than the competitive products on the market.
Using our existing understanding of reservations products, our version 1 feature requirements, and competitive research; we created an application map. This map shows the user’s journey from beginning to end. Drafting this early helped everyone align on scope, terminology, and priority. The Funsize design team were then able to provide design time and duration estimates.
We focused on super high-fidelity wireframes. Here are a few of the critical and most used screens by a host including: table status, creating a reservation, viewing the day’s schedule, monthly reservations, designing or editing a restaurant table layout, and setting up rooms with unique rules.
Conceptual Design
Because the primary goal was to design an iPad reservation system that was drop dead easy-to-use, we decided to start the project with aesthetic conceptual design. We collaboratively aligned on the following goals of conceptual design in order to select a proper candidate to invest time and money on for the remainder of the project.
- Ensure immediate understanding of how to use the interface.
- Design and test conservative, popular, and highly-custom design directions with small business owners.
- Explore a range of design options to identify whether we’d prefer a design that was simple to implement or if a custom, and more complicated, design would be worth the investment.
- Design must excel in both low and high lighting environments.
- Small restaurant business owners should fall in love with it.
- Choose the direction we all believe in the most. (It’s rare that a client asks this of you, so enjoy complete preferential trust when you can.)
Deap: “Dude you’re asking us to pick one!?”
Natalie: “Haha, yes?”
Deap: “We’ll give it some thought. I gotta ask you though, what is your gut feeling?”
iPad Applied Visual Design
With an exciting conceptual design direction and “approved” wireframes in hand, we then applied our design across the full large scope of the product and finalized our design system and language.
Experience Design Map
Finally along with our delivery of design and design assets, we updated our App Map to an “Experience Design Map” so that all of the user flows could be referenced visually in full detail.
3. Online Booking Widgets
What would be the point in using a digital in-house reservation system if it didn’t allow you to take reservations online and integrate them in one place? Absolutely none.
Booking Flows
Being a TableHero customer means that you can easily accept reservations (free of cost) from your site. It’s as simple as adding a line of code. You can choose the default style or customize to your own branding guidelines.
Customization
You can choose the default style or customize to your own branding guidelines.
4. Table Hero Logo
We actually didn’t think we’d have time to design a logo — at Funsize we guarantee time not deliverables — but we did. It was actually expedited by the fact that we needed an iPad Application App Icon.
Matt Castillo, our Apprentice at the time, came up with a brand identity and logo mark that felt homemade and honest in it’s imperfections yet took design seriously with the symmetry and the T that doubles as a table. It also works well on solid colors, in corporate implementations, on marketing design that relies heavily on heavy photographic executions, and in digital product design which, as you saw, uses unique gradients.
5. Web Site
Below is a screen shot of the version 1 website we did to support TableHero pre-launch strategy.
6. TableHero Canvas
Research showed that most small mom and pop businesses didn’t even have a website so we solved that by creating Canvas. Canvas is product by TableHero that allows restaurants to create a simple and beautiful website that can take reservations in a matter of minutes.
Here’s how it works:
- Enter and claim your name.
- If TableHero finds you through an existing website, Google Places, Foursquare, or Yelp, they can automatically import your description, official photos, ratings, reviews, and customer photos.
- Choose a theme.
- Turn on “Accept Reservations” if wanna use the TableHero iPad Reservation App.
Theme Design
Here’s some themes you can pick from.
“Again, a tip of the hat to the entire team. Fantastic work.” — Deap Ubhi, CEO TableHero
All of this work and much, much more was created over 4 months in heavy collaboration between Funsize in Austin and TableHero in San Francisco and India, with complete transparency and a ton of love.
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Funsize is a service and product design agency that crafts delightful products for mobile, web, and beyond. Worked at by Friends.
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