Step 1: Set A Design Goal

Goal: Increase user engagement. Make users want to spend more time on the app exploring interesting places.

OpenTable Feature Design

Year: 2023

It was a nice summer and I went on a short trip to New Orleans. I dined at an oyster place where they use OpenTable for making reservations. I downloaded the consumer version of the app to explore other restaurants and I really liked it. But I felt like there is always something more I want from this app (similarly for Yelp, Resy or Eat App), something more fun and eye-catching that will make me want to explore more. Just reading ratings and reviews feels a bit dry, but what else can there be?

Step 2: Understand The Product

What does the product do?
Who are the user segments?
How does the product generate revenue and incur cost?

To answer these questions,

I started with building a business model canvas.

Screen Shot 2022-03-01 at 4.46.09 PM.png

Step 3: Brainstorm Pain Points

There are 2 major user segments - merchants and diners, and their product experience differ. I decided to start with "diners" as the user segment for brainstorming pain points, because this segment has the most amount of users driving the app experience and provides high business value.

Pain Point 1

There are so many restaurants in the city, but as a user I usually see only a few restaurants selected by the App on my home page. However the selections are not always in my preference.

Pain Point 2

The featured restaurants are all nice and decent, which also makes them look the same. I am a traveler in the city and want to find something special. What is that secret hidden place only locals know?

Pain Point 3

I have seen people post really cool food photos on social media. Ice-cream light on fire, huge roast ducks, underground bar behind a phone booth, why do I never discover such fun places?

Step 4: Design A Solution

Given the pain points above, I designed a Discover Story feature which lets diners easily explore cool restaurants in their feed, that are shared by other users. The story will help users discover novel experience which they are not aware previously, and thus spend more time on the app.

User can add their own stories by clicking "+" button

There is a feed showing all the fun experiences shared by other users.
From "secret date place in the city", to "9 ways to eat crabs at a new restaurant".

This story is posted by a food blogger
Steve, who loves exploring new places

User can click on a feed to view the full story, so they can now discover this secret place in NYC.

Users can react to the story post, or save this date idea for future use.

We should attract food bloggers/influencers from YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Also enable any user to become a micro-influencer to incentivize content creation.

User-generated content is the best advertisement for restaurants. Who doesn't want to see"a bar hidden behind phone booth"?

Also support videos to be more visually appealing. Users just click the play button:

Step 5: Metrics Measurement

Before feature development, we need user research and validations to estimate the demand for this feature and determine the best way to design it. But the after the feature release it is not the end, in order to measure success and make improvements, I would propose the below metrics to monitor:

Feature Usage Metrics:

Number of Discover stories created
Number of users creating stories as a percentage of total users
Number of Discover stories read
Number of users reading the discover stories as a percentage of total users
Average story read session time
Number of reactions (likes, comments, shares, saves) per user

Impacted Overall App Metrics

Number of restaurant page browsed
Number of reservations made
Total session time

More Thoughts & Considerations

Numerous research have shown the correlation between user's action browsing feed content and driving engagement time. Enabling short videos in feed will further strengthen user's tendency to browse through content. It's the same reason why products like TikTok can keep users so engaged, able to make people spend 1 hour watching short videos without wanting to stop. From a psychological perspective, this behavior can be explained by the reward mechanism in the human brain. When we receive favorable outside stimulus, our brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which triggers pleasure, motivation and learning. When new information or stimulus are received repeatedly and dopamine reward us each time, this is how we develop craving for the given stimulus. It's the same mechanism that drives our craving for sweets, a really interesting book, and user feed stories. In this scenario, when users see photos of delicious food, videos of novel bars, and interesting dining experience shared by others, the feeling of surprise, excitement, or curiosity will also trigger mental reward and attract users to explore more.

It's important to note that, unlike TikTok, OpenTable is not a short video platform and unlike Facebook, OpenTable is not a social media. However, adding such elements effectively to the dining experience have the potential to significantly reshape how people use the app and create new growth opportunities. The app already has feed content today, but let's compare how this new experience will be different from the feed that exists today :

Current feed:

VS.

New Discovery story:

1. Content is not user generated

2. Recommendations are determined by what we claim the user will like

3. Restaurant cover image is not eye-catching enough, they all look nice in a way that looks similar.

4. At first glance, does not show what's special about a restaurant

5. Once user finds a place, no interest/curiosity to discover more.

6, Does not let user discover rare experiences they don't know (You won't search "Fire on ice-cream" if you have never heard of it).

1. User generated content.

2. Recommendations are determined by what many other users find interesting.

3. Users tend to post the most eye-catching image/video that they take at this restaurant.

4. At first glance, shows what's most special about a restaurant

5. Even after user finds a place, there are still many interesting content to browse, save for the future or share with friends.

6. Enable users to discover experiences for the first time, so they will want to make more reservations & orders using the app.

Other Considerations:

There are 2 types of users who create Discover Stories - people who just casually post their experience for fun and people who take it more seriously like a food blogger. The posting process should be both straightforward and able to contain more details, to support the need of both user groups.

It's likely to have much more users who are passive readers of Discovery stories than people who want to become active creators. It's also possible to run into bottleneck at initial feature adoption, especially getting users to start creating Discovery stories. So incentives are needed to help users develop new usage habits. For example allowing a restaurant to offer small discounts to users who are willing to post their experience at that restaurant.

Filters like geolocation should also be supported for Discovery stories, so that users will be able to look at only stories that are relevant to them.

Algorithm is needed to determine the display priority of Discovery stories based on factors such as story popularity, time recency, user's food preference, user's interaction with similar stories. So the ability to track such data points should be considered when designing data architecture.