TheFork's booking module was outdated

This main conversion point for Restaurants was accumulating complaints, bugs and overall a bad experience that left the Restaurant dissatisfied and us with a poor image.

What is the booking module? - A professional interface on your own website - Book tables in real time - A service available 7/7 and 24/24h - Cross-sell with other days or other companies - A tool for managing group bookings with a menu proposed automatically

Top design challenges

1. Information architecture — Users had difficulties making choices. Although a focused navigation was aimed for, disclosure of information made it difficult.
2. A confusing configuration page — The configuration page presented many issues that restaurants had to go through account managers to set their booking module for them, losing time and money.
3. Little to no space to grow — An exciting moment before us with a new focus on delivering features to Restaurants. Nevertheless, this booking module had little margin to deploy new features.

Old Booking flow — as seen on Restaurant websites

Old Cconfiguration — within TheFork Manager software

Setup ran in three steps: choose a type of booking module, personalize it, and obtain your booking module code.

Research

I did internal user research to better understand the issues and came up with hypotheses to be confirmed, moving progressively through:

1. Exploratory interviews with Account Managers
2. Quantitative analysis (rainbow spreadsheet) with Account Managers and Customer Support
3. Shadowing + interviews adding Trainers
4. Qualitative interviews to confirm hypotheses with Restaurants directly

After the research, all the knowledge was captured through glean.ly — at the time, our newly adopted Atomic Research database.

Booking module redesign

In terms of UI, this was an opportunity to align and reuse components used within the Dinners' tribe

The booking module was a Restaurants' tribe–owned project. But being user-facing, it only made sense that we aligned with our B2C counterparts to have a unified experience for users going through our website or through our customers' websites.

New user flow — as seen on Restaurant pages

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New configuration — within TFM software

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Our booking module became widely used and allowed us to implement tons of expected features

Restaurants were pleased and account managers got their workload reduced. But still, we had one small but mighty group of clients that was yet to fully implement our solution.