How we evolved
OpenTable, Resy, Tock and SevenRooms were all chasing the same restaurants, and we had to give them a reason to pick us that no one else could match.
Many restaurants hired a person, or sometimes a small team, just to work out who sat where each night. We built algorithms to take that work off their hands and put more butts in seats. That freed their staff to focus on hospitality.
We also rebuilt Reserve’s core experience. Restaurants got an overhauled in-service app, and diners got new, much more personal apps unlike anything else out there.
Restaurants took notice, and subscriptions grew 40%.
For restaurants and their diners
Fitting parties onto tables was someone’s entire job, sometimes a small team’s. We built algorithms to do it instead. They reshuffled parties, pushed tables together, and used each restaurant’s own data on how long groups stayed. More guests could dine at the same time.
Restaurants with long waits spent busy shifts phoning people about their table. We added two-way texting to the host’s app, with ready-made messages they could tweak before sending.
“The texting feature is a HUGE time saver. We no longer have to call guests to confirm.”
The home page led with curated picks like Neighborhood Gems, the kind of tips a friend would give. And because diners searched for things like an award winner or a certain vibe, we built filters for exactly that. No other reservation app offered either at the time.
Diners decided from photos and word of mouth. Each page led with pictures of the room and the food, put awards up front and told the chef’s story in the restaurant’s own voice, with the menu, website and phone number a tap away.
A booked-up restaurant used to be a dead end. Now diners saw other times, walk-in details and a standby list first, then similar places nearby with open tables, so they still found somewhere to eat.
We wanted Reserve to feel like a friend who knows restaurants. Helpful tips showed up at key moments, and the copy had a little fun, especially once a reservation was confirmed.
Behind the scenes
We built the seating algorithms first, then designed everything else around what they could do.
We overhauled the app restaurants ran service on, built a web version for managing reservations, and redid the booking widgets on their own websites.
We asked diners to show us, not tell us, how they found a restaurant and made a reservation. Their needs changed with who they were eating with and why. And when someone got a table they really wanted, the joy was obvious: “Oh yay! I got in.” From then on, we treated booking as something to enjoy, not just a transaction.
Diners relied most on tips from family, friends and food blogs, so we set out to be that go-to friend. Our designers studied brands people trusted, like Casper, Google Flights and Slack, to see how they earned it.
Small groups from across the company sketched ideas for the home page and restaurant pages. The strongest became wireframes, which we tested with diners of all ages and dining habits.
Once we added real photos to the tests, people skipped restaurants with weak pictures, even award winners. Most couldn’t afford a photographer, so our team found better shots on Instagram and Google, and a handful made a huge difference.
Our engineers and testers joined every round of research and design. They flagged technical problems early and brought ideas of their own.
Google and Facebook asked us to be one of the first companies offering reservations on their platforms, and Expedia asked us to build a version of our site under its name. I led all three projects.
By 2018