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.
13 Comments
Great post, Des, and a great result for Grab My Table too. I love seeing your thinking set out this way. Congrats on a job well done.
Posted by John at 1:47 pm on 30 July, 2009.
Well done guys!
Posted by Steve Quinlan at 1:55 pm on 30 July, 2009.
The notion of restaurant pages being like “self-contained sites” is interesting and explains the lack of navigation that had been bothering me.
It does however make it somewhat cumbersome to navigate the site to find and add a bunch of my favourite restaurants — for example after searching for “gruel”, clicking, then liking, I’d have to navigate back three screens to start looking for another restaurant.
Thanks for posting the rationale here though and it’s nice to get a look at the restaurant CMS behind it. Looks like a very nice piece of work. Site is beautiful too by the way!
Posted by Oisin at 4:10 pm on 30 July, 2009.
Hey Oisín,
Yeah, it’s been tricky. The Grab My Table logo links back to the home. At the end of the day it’s rarely in restaurateurs interests to send you elsewhere.
Thanks for the kind words,
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 4:13 pm on 30 July, 2009.
Hi Des,
Yeah in the context of being the restaurant’s own page it makes good sense the way it is.
A couple of “small” things —yeah I know, no such thing as a small change: )— GrabMyTable could consider in the future to ease navigation would be forwarding direct to profile page on a search with one result (like “gruel”) for example, and an AJAX solution to becoming a fan which wouldn’t require a complete page reload.
But I wouldn’t be looking at details like that if everything else didn’t sit so well with me.
Best of luck to Niall and all the Grab My Table crew, would love to see this take off internationally.
Posted by Oisin at 4:33 pm on 30 July, 2009.
Great work as usual folks. A more powerful restaurant search is definitely needed, ideally allowing refinement by town name and Maps integration. I love the idea and the design. Best of luck with it.
Posted by Ken at 6:16 pm on 30 July, 2009.
The site is really nice and works really well.
The design has Contrast written all over it !
Can you try and convince Niall to rename Food and Fizz to something else ?!
Posted by Graham at 6:51 pm on 30 July, 2009.
The site itself is pretty gorgeous, but the JPEG compression is far too agressive; it looks like you’re using the cheapest available images from istockphoto. I realise designers aren’t always given high-quality photographs to work with, but every image on the site looks mangled.
Posted by Furious D at 3:45 am on 31 July, 2009.
More great work, congrats guys!
Posted by Colm at 5:14 pm on 31 July, 2009.
Hi Des,
I think there’s a lot to like about what you’ve done on this site, in particular the strong visual prominence of the photos, and the conversations between punter and restauranteur. Congrats on it.
I agree with some earlier comments about navigation issues (how do I get back to the main page?) and also browsability/discoverability of restaurants.
A few other thoughts I’d make are:
- How many people will figure out that you click on the photos to advance them? The whole carousel interaction there has quite a high learning curve. I think some visual indication to click would help a lot.
- You’ve noted how most review systems are overly complex and broken. I think in this case you’ve opted for the other extreme. I found the “fan” thing a bit confusing — do I become a fan as part of a rating or b/c I want free offers from the restaurant? Why isn’t it recorded if I’m *not* a fan? And why aren’t these binary ratings associated with each review?
Also, what are the aggregate reviews for a restaurant? Maybe one restaurant has five out of five reviewers as fans, but another restaurant has 10 out of 20 reviewers as fans, but the latter will show up as the “better” restaurant, even though only half of the people liked it. That doesn’t seem quite right. Basically you’ve got to read all the reviews to figure out your own average rating for the restaurant. I don’t think that scales too well.
Anyhow, best of luck with the site — I hope it catches on.
Posted by Brian Donohue at 11:22 pm on 2 August, 2009.
Hey Brian,
Thanks for your congratulations,
I’ll quickly reply, but to be honest I’d need to walk you through the evolution of the application to see how these ideas came to fruition:
Slideshow - Everyone seems to clicks the photos (based on the data) I think the behaviour may surprise them, but it’s not a case of them not knowing about it. It’s a discoverable action.
Reviews - Yep, we went for the other extreme. Aggregate scores or proportion of reviewer/fan can of course be calculated whenever we want. I figure start with the other extreme, and add complexity if & where necessary. We’ll see how it goes.
Cheers for your thoughts,
Chat soon
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 12:02 am on 3 August, 2009.
Howya Des,
I’m going to have to disagree with Brian (disclosure: colleague, good pal and potential father in law to my son, should everything go to plan in about 25 years or so) on the carousel.
I think your carousel introduces a sense of playfulness into the site, a sense of discoverability as Des put it. That tiny sense of achievement or eureka moment when you go, “Oh yeah, that’s how it works, that’s fucking cool, that’s enjoyable”.
It instantly reminded me of Mad Men, the last episode of season 1 where Kodak were trying to market a projector based on features. Their USP was that it had a wheel, and as technologists thought this alone would be enough to differentiate themselves.
The Kodak engineers tried to link it back to the first technological breakthrough, the original wheel and that would be enough to delight their intended audience.
Em, no. In Don Draper’s eyes (the creative genius from the ad company) this wasn’t enough. It wasn’t just a wheel or a piece of technology. It was a carousel, the kind of carousel our kids love, the carousel from Victorian times which can still instil wonderment and joy even in 2009.
So, instead of copying a carousel from a design pattern site or an OmniGraffle stencil set, I think you’ve gone one better.
On reviews, it can get to be a real bitch in terms of how complex you let it get. Case in point is that NetFlix have offered a million bucks to get some help on their recommendations algorithm though Stefan Kloceck from Cooper had a great blog post on the subject.
Where I agree with Brian is around the fan - it wasn’t clear to me what the difference between fan, reviewer and “open to offers” was, until after signing up and exploring a bit.
For example, I may never have been to Le Coq Hardi, so I’m not a “fan”, but I’d still like to avail of one of their offers - the latent demand factor.
But maybe the fan thing isn’t actually a problem. Anecdotally, looking at LinkedIn and FaceBook, signing up to something for gratification that isn’t quite instant may not be so much of barrier.
Overall, it’s completely different to other review sites, the menupages.ie and yelps of this world. And better for it. It offers a far richer experience for potential diners, reviewers and restauranteurs and I applaud you for it. Great piece of work for all involved.
Posted by Lar Veale at 10:02 pm on 8 August, 2009.
I think it’s a phenomenal effort, but I really don’t get the name. ‘Grab My Table’ implies a centralised booking hub, like Open Table in NYC and other cities. Is this on the cards down the line?
Posted by Stephen at 2:54 pm on 10 August, 2009.