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What: Improved user experience betters the bottom line

OpenTable is the leading supplier of reservation and customer relationship management solutions to the restaurant industry. OpenTable’s Electronic Reservation Book technology enables over 1100 fine dining establishments across the country to accept online reservations .

The Challenge:The OpenTable ERB has become the industry standard for restaurant back office operations. However, the consumer facing web site (shown right) which services diners, concierges and administrative assistants, was not driving the reservation traffic that OT needed to reach its revenue goals. Additionally, the OT product team felt they were lacking in discipline and methodology when it came to their web-based product development.

My Role:I had four objectives in my 15 weeks assignment: 1) drive a short-term re-design of the existing site to increase ease of use and drive conversion numbers up, 2) put together plan for data gathering and analysis so that we could measure our success 3) develop a long-term product development plan and next version requirements document, and 4) train OT’s product manager in development processes.

The Results:I created two designs for the main search page of the site (shown below, right), one maintaining "all choices for searching on the navigation page" (like to original) and a second separating search types into different tabs. OT decided they liked both version equally so we launched both for an A/B test. Our new stats tracking showed us that both designs performed equally well, both increased the number of searches by 20% and both increased conversion ("looker to booker") by 10%. OT’s revenue model is directly tied to number of reservations made, so all were happy with our results. As we developed the plan for the next version of the site, we decided to go with the tabbed design because it offered more options for adding special promotions, announcements and advertising.
www.opentable.com