Project Brief

Project Name: Improving Open Table's app

Primary Function: Increase user retention and trust by integrating social features and friend reviews.

Problem Statement: OpenTable lacked a feature allowing users to connect with friends and view their restaurant reviews, impacting trust and retention.

Role and Collaboration

Serving as a UX Designer and Researcher, my responsibilities extended to conducting comprehensive user research, executing usability reviews, benchmarking against competitors, designing user flows, and creating prototypes. Along with my colleague Breanne Dorsey, we maintained a close collaborative partnership with the OpenTable team, our instructor Preeti Kohli, and the app's users.

Design Process and Tools

• Problem Definition, User Research, Usability Review, and Competitor Benchmarking: Through Lean UX methodology, we defined the problem and identified our target users. User surveys and mindmaps were essential in discerning user needs. We also conducted a usability review of the existing app and a competitor benchmarking to identify areas for improvement.

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• Hypothesis Creation: Based on the research, we developed two hypotheses that bridging social connections could enhance user trust and increase retention.

• MVP Building: We transitioned our insights into wireframes and a mid-fidelity prototype using Open Table's design system.‍

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• Testing and Iteration: Our prototype underwent extensive testing on UseBerry, yielding valuable feedback that significantly improved our usability score from 26% to 74%. The mis-click rate also dropped from 62% to 31%

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Solution

Our solution aimed at instilling a sense of community, engagement, and accomplishment amongst users, ultimately driving retention. This manifested as the following features in the redesigned OpenTable app:

1. Social Badges: Replacing the conventional point system, we introduced social badges. These badges offer recognition for user progress and achievements, fostering a sense of accomplishment and community. It engages users with an element of friendly competition and personalized goals.
2. Account Completion Rate: We implemented an account completion rate feature that guided new users through profile setup. This ranged from easy tasks like adding a profile picture to more involved tasks like writing a review, gradually turning external triggers into internal ones.
3. Hooked Model: We leveraged the Hooked model to establish habit-forming behaviors. The trigger-action-reward-investment loop was incorporated in earning and sharing badges, receiving likes on reviews, and progressing the account completion rate.

Other features included social login, public/private profiles, review feed, easy reservation functionality, 'super reviewers', restaurant/friend tagging, and review feed filter.

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Impact

The final solution received positive feedback from stakeholders and users. Most notably, the interest in connecting with friends rose from 12% to 68% after showcasing the high-fidelity prototype.

This project underscored the importance of early and frequent user engagement in the design process. If I were to do it again, I'd incorporate user testing of the original application for more thorough problem identification. This learning has since influenced my approach to subsequent projects.

This project showcase presents a balanced overview of my approach, skills, and the quality of work I can deliver as a UX Designer and Researcher. It particularly highlights my capabilities to think strategically, understand user behavior, and design engaging, community-driven features.