Overview

Founded in 1963, HM Restaurants is the countries leading restaurant retailer. Running 2,700 restaurants in towns, villages and city-centre high streets across England, Wales and Scotland. The current website was very outdated and failed accessibility. My role in the project was to design and lead the user experience while providing guidance to multiple stakeholders, BAs, operations, copywriters and developers.

The prototype was created on Figma and met AA accessibility standards.

The Opportunity

• Investigate existing challenges with the large booking process
• Reimagine and improve the current experience

Insight

Current user experience doesn’t provide users with the information they may need

The Goal

  • Reduce phone calls

  • Improve customer satisfaction

  • Broader positioning of large party bookings

The team

Throughout the project I worked in a cross-functional team. As the lead UX designer, I was involved in all phases of the project, from mapping out the problem to delivering final designs. The team consisted of over 15 individuals which included: BAs, Onshore and offshore developers, Operations, SMEs’, copywriters, UI designers and project managers; gradually as requirements changed the team size also adapted.

Responsibilities

Lead UX design, Lead design communication with stakeholders, Interaction design, Wireframing, Prototyping, and Testing.

The Process

My process will be different in different projects and will be determined by many factors such as the project goals, business needs, complexity of the problem, time and etc. Here I’ll describe my process for solving this problem.

GPP- process (2).jpg

Research

CX/EX RESEARCH

In order to understand what information, offerings, details to include in the enquiry journey and how to elevate the experience from a CX and EX perspective, we first needed to understand two things:

What is are the pain points with the current process?
What would an ideal scenario look like for customers and employees?

CX Research objectives

  • Conduct research with customers who’s booked spaces for occasions

  • Define the ‘as is’ experience: from the moment the user decides to book for an occasion to the point at which the event is over - what is every step in that journey

  • Understand current user journey pain points

  • Discover the needs and behaviours of customers to inspire ideas for how we might design the best-in-class occasion booking system

Method

Remote/ In person 1:1 interviews

EX Research objectives

  • Speak with General Managers to get a better understanding of what steps and considerations a GM has to take before accepting a booking request

  • Get a better understanding of the current end to end process from a GMs perspective

  • Get a better understanding of the current pain points of GMs with the current occasion booking process and reasons behind their pain points

  • Get a better understanding of an ideal occasion journey

Method

Remote/ In person 1:1 interviews
Guerilla research

Summarised findings

Biggest Pain points

  • Lack of information from the customers enquiry

  • Getting customers to pre-order

  • Collecting deposits from customer

  • Communicating the terms & rules to the customers

  • Seeing the various buffet/ package offerings online

  • Being offered alternative venue options if desired space is unavailable

  • Understanding the vibe of the restaurant and the spaces

opportunities

  • Ensure enquiry quality / the right data exchange

  • Improve the pre-order process (giving customers a reason to pre-order)

  • Identify improvements within the deposit collection process

  • All enquires to go to one place, reduce the need for managers to manually add enquires

  • Provide the right information to customers upfront, so that they can self serve

Discovery

There was a huge opportunity to maximise large party business potential.

LIVE ‘FUNCTIONS’ PAGE DATA

  • We looked at three sites that have a live ‘functions’ page

  • For those sites the ‘functions’ page is between the 2nd and 5th most clicked area.

  • Accounting for up to 19.5% of total clicks for some sites.

EX RESEARCH FINDINGS

We know that some restaurants have to turn away large party business because they’re fully booked, but we currently have no way to keep that business.

NO INFORMATION FOR LARGE PARTY CUSTOMERS

Currently, the only way for customers to know that we have bookable spaces for large parties is if they call or email the restaurants directly. Unless, they happen to find one of the few sites that have a function page, in which case there still isn’t enough information and they would still need to call.

Direction

How might we offer the use of otherwise empty spaces at our venues, for large party bookings (e.g. corporate or celebrations)?

CROSS FUNCTIONAL IDEATION OUTPUTS

Using the EX/CX Research findings and “function” page audit as our guide, we conducted multiple ideation sessions (both in person and digital) to come up with ways we could maximise this large party offering. Here’s what we came up with:

  • Improve Enquiry Journey

  • Redesign the current ‘functions’ pages

  • Introduce ‘Alternative restaurants’

CROSS FUNCTIONAL IDEATION OUTPUTS

A clear indication from the research revealed the need of a “functions” page to both inform out customers and reduce the admin workload from General Managers.

Using all of the finding from both the EX & CX research, audit, and competitor analysis a Low fidelity “Functions” page was created. A low fidelity design was played back to the wider team including tech, FE, BE, QA, PO, SEO experts, content and design for feedback and to understand feasibility. During the last collab session we prioritised the scope and set out the next steps.

It was time to tackle the modules that build the page one by one.

Feature design - Price comparison

Now that we had established a list of modules, it was time to tackle them one by one.

Based on the research conducted 8 out of 11 people said the venue being the cheaper option was the driver for the decision to book there. Customers need to see the venue’s price points to compare with alternative venues.

With the research in mind what are some ideas we can come up with?

I had arranged a hands on collaborative workshop with design, content, FE, BE, QA, PO to answer the question - How can we allow customers to see the various buffet/ package offerings online?

During the workshop, everyone had created various options while the tech feasibility, discussed in the workshop, was taken into consideration. To finish the session I had set out a goal of identifying MVP and North Star features that we could move forward with.

High-Fidelity Design

With all of the research and design ideation I can created a high fidelity design which ensured WAG 2.0 AA Level accessibility and Branding.

Project learning

What have I learned from this project?

  • Being able to lead a team and drive a successfully delivered project

  • Simplicity is strength. As a designer, we are often lured by attractive, trendy and out of the box designs. But, We must always remember the ‘why’. The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it

  • Process in essential. For a project that is vast, it gives you a roadmap to navigate through what can be a clouded confusing route