Portfolio of Anna Zhang

The Problem

Restaurants need a way to manage and merchandise events separate from normal dine-in service

The Solution

A full suite events platform

My Role

Lead designer and researcher

The Impact

3X increase in completion rate; 1.5X increase in self-serve creation rate ; 3X increase in pre-paid event types

Problem Context

Although our core reservation management product was not geared towards events, our support and account management team frequently received requests to create events from our restaurants. In 2018, we received over 600 event requests. While we knew there was interest in merchandising and managing events through Resy, we had yet to understand how much time and effort to invest.

To gauge level of interest, we launched a V0 events feature in early 2019. Post launch, we saw nearly 700 events created in Q2 alone. While interest was high, initial data from V0 also pointed towards several usability issues and feature needs.

The Team

I led the design of our restaurant-facing tools and research with strategic restaurant partners. I worked on a feature team with a product manager and a team of 6 engineers. We worked in close collaboration with the consumer-facing feature team. Throughout the process, I also partnered extensively with our restaurant success managers, support and implementation team, and go-to-market team.

Initial Research

While many event tools exist in the market, restaurants were still in search of an alternative. Our hypothesis was that restaurants needed a system that better catered towards culinary experiences and could be managed with regular dine-in service. To better understand the problem, I conducted interviews with 9 restaurants and shadowed 2 event series.

Sharing the research with my team, I led a journey mapping exercise where we wrote down insights from each interview on sticky notes and began grouping into themes. Once my team and I had an understanding of restaurants problems and goals, I set out to align with stakeholders on the next phase of our Events product.

Key Research Insights

Events allow restaurants to reward regulars and convert new diners to regulars.

Events are an expensive venture and some restaurants have trouble selling out and turning a profit without proper marketing tools.

Events are concept-driven and this determines how they are sold (price point, guest count, etc).

Restaurants run events in a variety of formats:

General Admission Events

Assigned Seating Events

Any event format can be run in different capacities:

Full takeover, in place of normal service

Partial capacity, alongside normal service

Design Details

I tackled designs in 3 phases: event creation workflow, event management dashboard, and event check-in experience.

Creating Events

One of the biggest design challenges was landing on a workflow felt seamless for a different event types and allowed flexibility around a variety of dine-in service capacities. To achieve this, I anchored event creation based on event formats to give users a guided workflow for each. I also used existing workflow conventions so managing an event felt just as familiar as running normal service. Early usability tests showed that we were heading in the right direction and pointed out areas of improvement.

Managing Events

From the moment tickets are on sale and to the moment guests enter the door, restaurants are looking at a variety of factors and metrics that determine updates in ticket quantity, price point, menu options, and more. I designed a dashboard that allowed restaurants to easily track sales and manage these changes.

Day of Event

One of my favorite parts of this project was designing the day of check-in experience. During my event shadows, I noticed that the start of a General Admission events was the most hectic and long check-in lines were often a point of frustration for both guests and restaurants. While our need was too custom for native Apple controls, I wanted to interaction to still feel familiar. After many iterations, I landed on a fun swipe to check-in experience that achieved the goal of a quick and seamless check-in experience.

Full Party Check-In

Swipe right to quickly check in multiple guests who purchased tickets together. Restaurants loved this feature as other event platforms require checking in each individual guest, however most culinary event tickets are purchased by party.

Partial Party Check-In

Quickly check in partial parties and track how many guests have left to arrive. Guests frequently do not arrive with their full party and tracking this per party for events was previously a huge painpoint with our existing reservation management tool.

Beta Testing & Learning

We launched the events product to beta in time for Valentine’s Day 2020 - one of the single largest revenue driving nights of the year. This was the first time Resy conducted a formalized beta test for a feature launch. I led research for the initial beta phase with 12 restaurants ranging across major markets and different tiers of restaurants. We required that restaurants involved in the beta participate in multiple touchpoints with me before and after their event. Through this process, we were able to identify and quickly address launch blockers, bugs, and usability issues. It also led to a backlog of feature improvements that we are continuing to work through. Below are a few insights from the beta test.

Restaurants are repeat users - an average of 3 events were created per venue.

Restaurants are frequently experimenting with new event concepts and formats, even after ticket sales are live, resulting in a high number of changes.

Restaurants are not utilizing option to save events as draft and are instead going live right away to look at their event page.

Launch

Soon after we rolled out this feature to all restaurants, the covid-19 pandemic hit and restaurants across the globe were forced to close. While the events feature hasn’t been used in the capacity we expected, this tool has provided restaurants with alternative ways to market and manage alternative revenue streams such as takeout, virtual events, and more. The usage of this feature has exceeded my teams' expectations and led to signficant increases in usability metrics as well as a 3X increase in pre-paid events, helping Resy hit revenue targets each quarter.

This tool also enabled Resy to make it on Fast Company's most innovative live events companies of 2021.