Project Goal 📍
Conduct a heuristic evaluation, and redesign the app to make it more user-friendly and intuitive, ultimately enhancing users' dining reservation and restaurant discovery experience.
Why Resy?
Resy is a rapidly growing digital platform that allows diners to make reservations. We selected Resy as our chosen platform due to the notable contrast between its web and app designs. We found that working on the web design is comparatively more manageable than on the app, which influenced our decision.
Desktop:
Mobile:
☝🏼Before we begin the heuristic evaluation, there are two vital aspects to take into account:
1. Nielsen's 10 usability principles, which will act as our guiding principles.
2. Severity scale that will help us determine the seriousness of violations, spanning from critical concerns to minor inconveniences.
This scale represents a range of opinions, with 0 indicating disagreement that this is a usability problem, and 4 indicating a severe usability catastrophe.
Meet Our User, Kelly
Current State
Kelly is currently navigating through the task flow, evaluating her options, and ultimately selecting a time and location for dinner.
Design Priority Matrix
After going through a heuristic evaluation of the Resys app following our selected task flow, we organized and ranked the findings using a design priority matrix.
Our most important violations to focus on would be the navigation of the app and making it easier to find reservation times of choice. This would retain our diners on both our websites and app instead of being left confused.
1. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
The page appears overloaded with text, lacking a clear text hierarchy or distinct color differentiation. This can potentially overwhelm users and lead to important information being overlooked.
Minor usability problem
Re-Design
Improved the text presentation by introducing a clear hierarchy. By strategically highlighting the most important elements, we've transformed the content into a much more reader-friendly format. This enhancement ensures that users can effortlessly navigate through the text, focusing on key information and enhancing the overall readability of the content.
2. User Control & Freedom
At the top of the screen, you'll find a date and time picker that may not immediately convey its functionality. It diverges from the conventional time and date pickers users typically encounter, potentially causing confusion. Users may not realize that they can adjust the date if they change their mind about the desired reservation time
Major usability problem
Re-Design
Relocated the date picker to the center of the screen, ensuring it's prominently visible and easily accessible to users. Additionally, introduced a helpful question icon adjacent to the date picker, providing users with clear instructions on its functionality. These changes enhance usability and make the process of selecting a date and time for reservations more intuitive and user-friendly.
3. Flexibility & Efficiency of Use
Users currently need to scroll vertically to find a suitable date, which can be cumbersome, especially for restaurants with many reservation options.
Minor usability problem
Re-Design
Instead of relying on traditional scrolling time pickers, we've created an intuitive overlay that displays all available time slots in a single, comprehensive view. This new approach allows users to quickly and effortlessly assess all the available reservation times at once, simplifying the booking process and providing a more efficient and user-friendly experience."
Next Step
After conducting a heuristic evaluation and redesigning three critical features of the app to enhance user-friendliness, our next step involves user testing to validate the effectiveness of our design improvements. Through this phase, we aim to gather valuable insights from real users to ensure that our changes genuinely enhance the app's usability