Virtual queues & bookings for restaurants

Our north star

Our north star as a tribe was RAG's. RAG's stand for "Remote Arrived Guests."

We gain a RAG when a consumer is seated in the Dojo bookings system. We care about these because we as a tribe have influenced the consumer’s behaviour, encouraging them to book using our products. This is good for Dojo because the more people we can encourage to book and visit restaurants the more transactions are made through Dojo.

Context

Through previous research and spending time with our customers we knew about a few things that they really care about. Such as the guest experience, maximising table utilisation and attracting new and repeat guests. We spent much time debating what we should focus on and decided on helping our customers to maximise their table utilisation. We thought that if we could help to increase this, restaurants could turn tables faster, seat more guests and generate more revenue.

We were also already in a good position after building a product that collects the table availability for restaurants and how long they want their guests to sit for. This was where we knew we could potentially win.

What would success look like?

To measure what success would look like we also agreed on a metric to track:

Average table utilisation

‍There are a few data points that go into calculating this, however, it is basically measuring how many guests restaurants are seating.

We also needed to ensure that our solution was a great customer experience so we also had some additional tracking in place to ensure restaurants were actually using our solution plus seating and allocating guests to suitable tables in a reasonable time. These were agreed on once our solution was more defined.

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Research

We conducted interviews with existing customers and restaurants using competitor solutions to better understand the challenges they faced around maximising table utilisation. We had a few assumptions that we focused on going into these interviews that we wanted to validate, such as:

Hosts struggle to determine table availability

We believed hosts find it difficult to accurately assess how long a table is free for when deciding if they can seat a guest.

Managing table change requests is challenging‍

We believe hosts struggle when diners request a different table than the one initially assigned.

Hosts lack confidence when making seating decisions‍

We believe hosts feel uncertain when seating guests because they are unsure if it will impact future reservations.

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What did we learn

We discovered that Dojo customers struggled to get a clear overview of their day, as bookings were displayed in a list view, making it difficult to see what tables had already been allocated and to who. The list view also made it hard to accommodate walk-in guests, as spotting gaps between bookings was not intuitive.

Additionally, we learned that for restaurant managers, the list view created difficulties in staffing decisions, making it hard to predict when extra hands were needed during busy times or when fewer staff could manage quieter periods.

Squad collaboration

This project required close collaboration between all squad members. In the early stages, I facilitated customer interviews, ensuring all squad members could participate and gain firsthand insights into customer challenges. During the ideation phase we brainstormed and workshopped different ideas and ways we could solve this problem.

In the refinement and development stage, we collaborated on interaction design, technical implementation, delivery sequencing, and feature prioritisation. This approach ensured we launched a minimum viable solution that met customer needs while laying the foundation for future improvements.