Restaurant Booking App
Insights that keep your tables full
The client, a restaurant booking app, needed to improve value for its partners. Restaurants struggled with limited customer insight, no centralised dashboard for performance tracking, and few marketing tools to drive bookings. Our task was to design a streamlined solution that addressed these gaps.
Project type: Booking insights dashboard
‍Role: Sole UX/UI designer - 1st phase, working with two strategic designers
‍Industry: Hospitality
‍Tools: Figma, FigJam, Zoom, Miro
‍Duration: Q4 2024, 1 month
The Problem
Lack of Customer Insight
Restaurant owners had limited visibility into their customer base, making it difficult to understand booking patterns, preferences, and engagement behaviours.
No Centralised Performance Dashboard
There was no streamlined way for restaurants to monitor key metrics such as occupancy rates, campaign performance, or customer trends—all essential for data-driven decisions.
Limited Marketing Capabilities
Restaurants lacked an easy-to-use system to create and manage targeted campaigns within the app, missing opportunities to boost bookings and customer engagement.
Insights
Building on prior interviews conducted by the client and strategy team, I worked with the strategic design team in a workshop session to review the collected data. We pulled out key quotes and began uncovering differences between the managers’ and marketing teams’ perspectives.
Restaurant Managers
1. “I don’t know who my most loyal customers are, or how often they come back.”
2. “When I adjust prices or specials, it’s hard to know if it actually drives more bookings.”
3. “I don’t know which menu items drive the most bookings — we don’t link food sales to reservations.”
Marketing
1. “Instagram posts get likes, but we can’t see whether those translate into bookings.”
2. “By the time we pull the numbers into Excel, the campaign is already over. We need real-time visibility.”
3. “It’s difficult to see if a drop in bookings is seasonal, or if we’re losing repeat customers.”
Pain Points
Following the data analysis, we synthesised and clustered insights to surface recurring themes and establish key pain points.
Managers pain point
Information is scattered across systems (POS, paper, spreadsheets) and doesn’t connect. Staff waste time on admin and lack a holistic view of performance.
Marketing pain point
Campaigns are one-size-fits-all because there’s no segmentation or cross-channel tracking, leading to wasted effort and generic offers.
How Might We
We can the ask how can we turn these pain points into questions.
Design Decisions  
Restaurant Managers
1. Create a central dashboard that aggregates all booking data in one place.
‍Design a performance overview screen with clear KPIs (occupancy, average ticket size, booking trends) and easy comparison over time.
2. Provide insights into customer behaviour and loyalty.
Introduce customer segmentation modules showing new vs. returning diners, repeat booking frequency, and customer demographics.
3. Introduce a filtering system
‍Allow filtering and comparison across weeks/months so restaurants can spot seasonal patterns or shifts in online visibility.
Marketing
1. Campaign Creation Screen
Provide recommendations based on selected goals (Who, When, What, How) to reduce trial-and-error.
2. Create a feature for campaigns.
Allow different campaign types (exclusive event invites, discounts, launches) so restaurants can tailor campaigns to specific business needs.
3. Campaign Overview Screen
‍Provide restaurants with a clear overview of active and past campaigns to understand performance at a glance.
Since the scope was limited, we focused on proposing a few key screens from the two key features identified from the workshop.
Process
Intial Concepts to Hi-fidelity
Solution
Managers
‍Design a performance overview screen with clear KPIs (occupancy, average ticket size, booking trends) and easy comparison over time.
Customer segmentation modules showing new vs. returning diners, repeat booking frequency, and customer demographics.
Marketing
Making campaign creation simple and guided by asking users to select goals, timing, and value.
Limitations
Limitations I faced and how I resolved them.
Late Entry into the Research Phase
I joined the project after user interviews had already been conducted by the strategy team. This meant I had to rely on secondary research and provided data.
Time Constraints
The project operated under tight deadlines, with limited hours to design, iterate, and prototype possible solutions. This restricted the level of exploration, testing, and refinement possible in the initial phase.
Restricted User Validation
Once features were outlined, the client was hesitant to allow further user interviews or usability testing before the proposal was delivered. This meant that user validation was limited to internal reviews and stakeholder feedback, rather than live user testing.
Scope Defined as a Proposal Prototype
The work was intended as an early-phase prototype for pitching, not a production-ready solution. As a result, some flows were simplified and not all edge cases were accounted for at this stage.