The Third Place
A new way to subscribe to your favorite restaurants
My Role
As Lead Product Designer, I guided our small team through design exercises to create user flows. I designed entire end-to-end product experience – sign up and onboarding flows, business tools, consumer native application, visual identity system. and marketing pages.
the Company
The Third Place is a startup currently in Stealth (founders ex-LinkedIn and ex-Khan Academy). We are looking to find creative ways to provide restaurants with an additional steam of revenue, and reward restaurant patrons for their continued support.
Deliverables
High-fidelity mockups & prototypes
Research findings, user flow charts & personas
Visual identity system
Website marketing pages & vector illustrations
The state of the restaurant industry
Even in the best restaurants, turning a profit can be challenging if tables aren’t completely booked
Yet, as restaurants popularize, tables book up at peak hours. Limited table availability hinders spontaneous dinner plans.
How might we create a service that creates more predictable income for restaurants and rewards loyal patrons?
A monthly subscription to your most beloved restaurants
Restaurant benefits
Additional revenue stream
Income ≠ hour-to-hour bookings
A space to explore creative endeavors
Subscriber benefits
Deeper relationship with favorite restaurants
Access to last-minute table bookings
Rewarded for loyalty
Consumer app design hypothesis
Based on user research, a subscription service with exclusive offerings like access to last-minute table bookings and private tastings could potentially achieve higher tips left for servers, more tables booked at off-peak hours, and more frequent visits from regular diners.
A crowded dashboard
In usability testing of early versions, we found that users were overwhelmed by restaurant details, call-to-actions, and messages being displayed on the dashboard.
Users were also concerned about how they would know if a table was available
Affordances & notifications
The dashboard was stripped down to highlight the restaurant over the content. Badges were added to subtly indicate a second tier of information, and a notification toggle was added as an MVP solution for allowing users to indicate if they would like to be notified of a last minute table availability.
