App launch: Grab My Table

Grab My Table is an app we built for one of our clients recently. The site launched this Monday, and as Niall and Seán are now in control, I figured we could point out a few interesting design decisions made during development.

The application serves two purposes; it’s a CMS for restaurants that helps them to build a nice site at a low cost, and it’s a restaurant review site letting visitors find, favourite, and review restaurants. The application currently serves Dublin city only, but no doubt that will change.

High visual impact

After looking at competing sites, and assessing how a restaurant likes to present itself, we decided that high quality photography was vital for success. The “infinite” carousel on the home page keeps the visitors amused, and the photo gallery lets every restaurant stand out based on what matters most: their food and their surroundings. We hoped the space we dedicated to photos would encourage the restaurants to put their best shots up; we wanted mouth watering pictures of delicious food, and we got them.

Later on in the project, we were told that some owners would have high quality video tours of their restaurants, so once again we decided prominence was important. A standard 400×320 postal stamp player wouldn’t work for visual punch, so we decided the best way to make use of the video was to use it in all its glory. See the Saba Restaurant for a sample of the video player.

Simple, sensible ratings

Most ratings systems are overly complex and broken. Asking a user to rate a restaurant for value, cleanliness, food, service, etc. is silly. Would you eat in a restaurant that had one star food but had truly excellent service? The only criteria that we could come up with was: Do you like the restaurant? So Grab My Table has a binary rating system. You either like a restaurant or you don’t.

A simple CMS

For the app to take off, the CMS needed a negligible learning curve. A restaurateur sees the exact same page as everyone else. The only difference is they can click on something to edit it. No training manuals here, thanks. You can see an early version of the CMS in this video sent out to restaurants. It’s improved a lot since then, but that demo convinced restaurant owners that this was a good app.

Honest reviews

Restaurateurs can reply to reviews, but they can’t delete them. They can flag offensive comments, and administrators will make a judgment call. But there is no easy “delete/hide this review” feature, no matter what price plan you’re on. This means that the visitors of the site can trust that the reviews are not selectively filtered.

Secondary branding

When someone visits a restaurant page, it has to look like a restaurant website, not a page on a restaurant review site. To this end, the Grab My Table branding had to be secondary. This is why we chose a transparent footer to indicate the separation between the restaurant and the Grab My Table network. Whilst we’ve had scores of good feedback thus far, perhaps my favourite piece came from Michael Bradley…

Patience and Hard work

The guys came to us with an interesting idea, and we really enjoyed working out many tricky design decisions. Like anything worthwhile, it’ll take both patience, and hard work to see this through. We wish them the best of luck with Grab My Table.