Mozelle’s Bistro

Mozelle’s is a restaurant focused on high quality, locally sourced ingredients based in Winston-Salem, NC. With extremely high demand, they were aiming to provide a platform where customers could book reservations, look at the menu, see photos, check out reviews, and more, without depending on big chains like Yelp. This project presents an approach to solving problems faced during a user’s restaurant experience by hosting all the information in one place.

Project Overview

Challenge:

Design a new restaurant app to help improve a user’s experience while visiting the restaurant and booking reservations.

Solution:

• Design a new app that helps users quickly book a reservation, view the menu, look at photos and past reviews or past reservations.

• Define a unique brand identity that reflects Mozelle’s attributes

Role:

UX/UI Designer

I am very familiar with Mozelle’s, but still wanted to start this project with research to gain a better understanding of the market trends for restaurants in our area.

Through my research, I wanted to:

• Understand the market trends of the restaurant industry, primarily focusing on the Triad of North Carolina

• Identify Mozelle’s competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses

• Understand the experiences people have when visiting restaurants and booking reservations

• Determine the ways in which their current system leaves customers behind

• Discover the goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations of Mozelle’s users

Demographics

• Mozelle’s target audience is adults who eat at restaurants at least once a week

• 20,000 citizens are employed by Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist hospital and many are resident doctors who are new to the area and looking to enjoy new restaurants

• 43 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 years stated that they visited Mozelles in the last year

• 68 percent of respondents aged 30 to 55 stated they visited Mozelles in the last year

• Currently, 70% of Mozelle’s customers book reservations ahead of time

Consumer Trends

• The population of Winston-Salem has been growing by 1.2% every year

• 54 percent of younger millennials (ages 18 to 26) eat out and 30 percent buy coffee. 51 percent go to a bar once per week and the average millennial eats out five times a week.

• According to The Hartman Group, 43 percent of Gen Xers eat out at least once a week, which puts them on par with millennials.

• Google has a limit on how many people you can book reservations for, and available times are not always up to date

• Google doesn’t have an option to add your name to the waitlist

• Fridays and Saturdays from 6-8 and Sundays at lunch are their busiest times by 30 percent

• Revenue grew YTD by 30 percent in 2022

Provisional Personas

To start getting an idea of who Mozelle’s users would be, I used my secondary research to create provisional personas. This created a better idea of what users needs might be based on their gains and pains.

Goals:

Meet new people in the area

Try new restaurants in town

Pains:

With a busy work schedule, it’s hard to go to busy restaurants without a reservation in advance

Difficulty making time for new friends without a concrete plan

Not able to check out the menu or reviews all in one place

New to Winston-Salem

Millenial (25-34yrs)

User Interviews

In order to learn about the real experiences people have had while booking reservations and visiting restaurants, I found 5 participants (fitting within the criteria of the provisional personas) to participate in user interviews. During the interviews, I focused on asking open-ended questions about their experiences to learn as much as possible about them and validate my understanding of them too.

“I guess it’s easier to make a decision when there’s a menu, reviews and reservations all in the same place. It’s nice that I don’t have to be redirected to three different websites to find that information.”

— David

Empathy Map

To synthesize all the information I had gathered from the user interviews, I wrote my findings on sticky notes and created an empathy map. By identifying common patterns across my findings, I was able to uncover key insights which helped me understand who Mozelle’s existing customers are and what the users would truly need. I then organized the data into categories and discovered the key insights which further helped me understand user needs.

Insights

1. People want to review their reservation before they confirm

2. People want the menu, reservations, photos and reviews to all be in the same place without being redirected to a new site

3. People have difficulty adding special concerns when booking reservations

Needs

1. To easily book a reservation without being redirected to multiple sites

2. To be able to add special requests to fit their needs

3. To be able to find the menu, past reservations, reviews and contact information easily and in the same place