Dine Out

An all-inclusive ecommerce website based around dining out at restaurants in your local city. DineOut would differentiate from others in the marketplace because it would create a membership-based program that offers prix-fixe menus to popular restaurants instead of only offering coupons/discounts like competitors. Each restaurant would have a profile with sample menus, as well as reviews from past users and Yelp. Once users purchase a membership, they have the ability to make dinner reservations through our website because of our partnership with OpenTable.

User Research

During my interviews, I found that many people enjoy going out to dinner and often go to the same restaurants because looking for new places would involve a lot of time doing research. Currently, users will go to websites like Yelp or UrbanSpoon for reviews, look at the restaurant websites for menus, and go to OpenTable to make reservations. This is time consuming and discourages users from trying new restaurants if they have to go through this process. I also found that users enjoy events like Restaurant Week because they are given the opportunity to try a variety of restaurants with fixed prices, offering the chance to visit restaurants they wouldn’t normally.

In my initial design, I proposed a step by step process to lead the user through the membership sign up process. I wanted to bring the entire process of researching restaurants, finding reviews and menus, and making reservations together on one website to save time.

In my first iterations, I realized the my two personas had very different goals and would both need to use the sight seamlessly. I also discovered through sketching and competitor research that it was important to offer up detailed information about each subscription option, as many websites wanted you to purchase blindly.

After usability testing and user flow creation, my goal was to simplify my home page and create a smoother entrance for first time users on my website. 

I added more imagery to show the viewer their potential experience and pared down the sign up process, make page regeneration automatic after completing each step. 

I also changed the Restaurant Owner flow to steer them onto the Membership page (accessible from Membership component in the Header), instead of having a solo button on the Home Page. This would keep all forms of membership, customer and restaurant, in one place.