The best restaurants are always in high demand, always a live queue, even if you want to make a call you dont know which restaurant has free tables plus the phones are busy on rush hours and in best case scenario they will need to contact you back when table is free.

The clients had the idea to create application which helps people find restaurants and make a reservation. You will be able to see the list of restaurants, their price , menu or the gallery so you can the interior, you can reserve in advance so you wont need to wait in queue.

After conducting the stakeholder interviews i got the idea of what the clients wants. I knew that i need to find my competition, so i can see what features are the most used, how they presented the restaurants, how were they managing the reservations. I decided to make a competitive analysis and a SWOT analysis.

After that i made two personas from the information about the target groups that my client wants to focus. I draw their flows on the app, the journeys for that flow and how they will react.

Lastly i sketched wireframes from the findings from research.

The first part of my research began at our competition. Firstly I made a SWOT analysis, so I can better see at their strengths and weaknesses and I can clearly highlight their threats going forward and make sure that I don't make the same

The competitive analysis was a success because the apps were more or less the same in terms of flow, card information and presentation. After that I used all of the application and made a list of their strengths , their weaknesses found opportunities and threats that they would have.

The two types of personas were simple. The first one is an office worker who goes on lunch in rush hour and cant allow to be stacked in queue because they were time sensitive, are already users or they use similar applications and already have a few restaurants that they are regulars. The second one contained the tourists that were visiting town and in need of an experience. They had problems finding the restaurants , they wanted to eat at a specific cuisine and always wanted to see the price range and the menu before making a reservation.

The application was made for two main purposes, one - searching for a restaurant and two - making a reservation. I decided to go for the scenario when the first persona goes to the app finds the restaurant, makes the reservation and don't make an account but continues as guests and fill in the information.

After conducting the research I was ready to make first visual contact with the application, and made a site map. The main focus was on restaurant's cards and reservations. On boarding you have the homepage with a lot of suggestions grouped in different categories, then you have your bookings( past and present), the map is a big part of the application ,then you have your saved restaurants (favorites) for fast access, and last on the menu is the personal profile.

After the complete research I was ready to make some sketches and see how my design would look like and if i have some points where i need to make adjustments or components that i can reuse throughout the application.

Making the sketches gave me the opportunity to visualize my design, but it still wasn't a ready product that i can clearly see what's going on or how the flow would be adapting to the users. Inserting text, image wrappers and buttons in the wireframes gave me a clear image of how the layout would look like.

The high fidelity prototype helped me to present the project to the client. He was able to scroll through the pages, make a reservation, access the personal profile and all of the main flows that the users would make using the application. If you are interested in the whole Figma file you can view it from here.

We talked a lot about the design system on the stakeholder interviews and concluded that they wanted the main colors to stay the same . About the fonts we wanted to types : For the paragraphs chose Helvetica - an open sans type of font with clear design easy to read and understand. For the titles I chose Satoshi, more styled type of font that catches the attention of the reader . A variety of icons that are used in the design help the user recognize actions and easily navigate through the menu. The main part of the icons are part of the main menu , arrows or chevrons and explanatory icons for restaurant features.

In the whole process of the design and research i had many ideas as to how i would like the application to be, and i would like to present them :
1. Gamification - if with every reservation made the user gets some bonus, or achievement it would reflect good about his opinion and he would feel proud or appreciated .
2. Sometimes users have special occasions , and they have special requests - it would be good to have checkbox with multiple options for user to check on what kind of reservation it is or text area where he would describe the occasion .
3. If the menu is accessible through the app then there is future ability to create one for the restaurant where they can manage their reservations, menus and orders through the app.
4. Introduce friend list for users with profile - they can make invite to reservations, split the bill, share moments etc...

This project helped me understand how important is to find the most annoying things for the users and how to fix their experience while using the applications

I understood how important are mobile applications for users who use them everyday and ultimately it helps them passing their day smoothly.

While i did my research i found out that even if you have an applications that is in the air and its working you must constantly find, fix or explore pain points or new features so the users continue using the app . The main source for finding mistakes or pain points are the users. If you read their reviews and hear about their problems you will understand how you need to address them and how you can fix your problems.