Improving OpenTable's user trust by implementing a social review flow

Project Overview

OpenTable's mobile app provides users the ability to browse restaurants, make real-time reservations and read dining reviews.

Role

Research, ideation, wireframing, hi-fidelity prototyping, usability testing

Problem Statement

When I am deciding which restaurant to go to, I want to be able to see reviews from my friends so that I feel more confident in booking a reservation.

Current State

Currently, there is a lack of social connectivity within the OpenTable app. The product does not allow existing users to connect with their friends, nor read their restaurant reviews.

The Solution

We concluded that a holistic approach was necessary to solve this problem. Therefore, we added a way for users to connect with friends, see their recent activity and read their reviews.

The Process

Discover

Define

Ideate

Design

Usability Audit

We navigated the app step-by-step as the user would to gain a better understanding of how our user interacts with the OpenTable app in its current state.

View full audit in Figma

User and Business Frustrations

We concluded that not only can users not read friend’s reviews, but users are also unable to find new restaurants to try based on reviews left by friends. This problem is promoting user hesitancy and lowering booking conversions for OpenTable.

Competitor Benchmarking

We conducted competitor benchmarking to gain a better understanding of how users are interacting with other products, see the current UX/UI standards in the industry, and identify any gaps we can fill with our product.

View full benchmarking in Figma

Ideation

In the center of our mind map, we have our problem statement and our user persona, Jamie. This was done to help us have a clear vision of the problem and better empathize with our target user while ideating.

User Flows and Priority Matrix

We used a priority matrix to help decide which features to implement. After choosing the features we mapped out the existing and new user flows to show us existing routes and how our additions and improvements will affect the journey for our user.

View in Figma

New Features and Functions

Connect
with friends

See recent activity
of social connections

Add a "friends"
page

Sort reviews
by friends

Wireframing

Homescreen

New "Friends" page

"Friends" review filter option

Adding contacts

New contact

Styles and Components

Hi-fi Screens

Homepage

New "Friends" page

"Tanya's" recent activity

Default reviews page

"Friends" review filter option

Friends reviews

Add contacts

Contacts selected

Invitation confirmed

Usability Testing

We tested our prototype using an unmoderated approach with Maze as a way to collect data at a low cost within a short time span. We ran our test with 25 participants to gain statistically significant data and gave them 5 tasks to complete.

Observations

93.83%

Average success rate (direct + indirect)

6.17%

Average bounce/
give up rate

20.2s

Average time on task

Maze Learnings

Add text next to the “+” icon that says, “add contacts”
Make the entire contact row interactive vs just a small clickable circle
Provide more context for screens/where users are in the prototype flow

Next Steps

Reiterate designs based on Maze learnings and run a second usability test
In the future it would be interesting to conduct research to see if users would find any of the following ideas useful. These were thought of in the ideation phase but were not implemented due to the time constraint.

onboarding screen that would ask users to connect with friends,
page where users could see their friends favorite restaurants
feature for groups to be notified when a large table became available
feature where users could send reservation RSVP links to their friends within the app