Product
Yelp Guest Manager
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
~2 months (Shipped 2019)
Overview
Yelp Guest Manager is a table management tool that allows restaurants to seamlessly manage their waitlist & front of house operations. Yelp Waitlist spearheaded the way for diners to join the waitlist remotely from the Yelp app and notify them when their table is ready saving hours of wait time.
Challenge
Organized chaos best describes what the front-of-house staff go through during peak dining hours. They have pressure from managers to quickly turn tables, keep guests happy, and juggle 10 other front-of-house duties. To top it off, managing 50+, 100+, 150+ parties on the waitlist is overwhelming and the current experience makes it difficult for them to properly plan and seat guests.
Hosts are constantly bombarded with 10 (quite literally!) different tasks simultaneously and it is especially overwhelming when during a huge rush.
Approach
What we want to achieve
Our primary goal was to grow our middle-large scale casual restaurants, thus growing our Yelp Waitlist user base. Additionally, we knew we had to introduce a unique product offering to strengthen our value prop and become the leading choice for restaurant front-house-house management systems.
I interviewed customers from the west coast to the east coast in order to understand the end-to-end process of how hosts are currently making waitlist decisions and identify any problems or barriers hosts encounter when managing the waitlist using our app. I also conducted ethnographic research, working shifts with 7 different restaurants in order to learn the unique processes of each host.
Status Quo
About 1/3 of the screen real estate is for managing the waitlist, showing about 9-11 parties at a time. During peak hours, the waitlist could reach 100+ guests.
Outcome
We tested our new designs with a 7 restaurants in the San Francisco area and found there was a higher learning curve for restaurants who aren’t practicing “staging.” Additionally, “staging” didn’t resonate with some of our restaurants, even for higher volume ones. We updated the copy to “All Arrived” and it rang clear to everyone across the board.
We released this feature to 150 restaurants that volunteered to opt in and we tracked usage in the first two weeks. On paper, it flopped.
But numbers don’t always tell the whole story...
About 45 of those restaurants used funnel view on a consistent basis. Of the 45, 30 showed high usage--as we hypothesized, were heavy volume hitters. Bingo.
Following the launch, we immediately signed on multiple locations from several national chain restaurants. This layout funnel view eventually outperformed the others leading us simplify the experience to two core views for customers.
