Reimagining the Picnic Reservation Flow
Overview
A four week project in Product Design Studio course redesigning the online reservation flow in the SF Parks and Recreation website, streamlining, organizing, and reimagining critical features of the reservation process.
Team
Myself
Role
Product Design
The Problem
The SF Parks and Recreation website includes a pipeline to reserve picnic areas in the city of San Francisco. The current user flow for making a reservation is complicated and difficult to navigate, and we were assigned the task of redesigning the site to suit some user and business goals. In the context of our class, we could redesign the site however we would like in order to accomplish these user and business goals.
- Wants to have a picnic for their birthday (weekend in late October)
- Looking for a picnic table, nice location
- Can have alcohol
- Near a bathroom
- More users successfully complete the flow (% completion)
- Fewer cancellations or problems
Discovery
In order to understand the shortcomings of the site, I led user interviews to understand user needs within the scope of reservation systems. Additionally, I conducted usability testing to identify pain points to address within the current flow, inviting users to book a reservation in the same context as the target user and asking them to verbalize their thought process about any positive or negative reactions to what they encounter.
I synthesized my findings from both user interviews and my own run-through of the reservation flow in an affinity diagram to identify and extract themes and common pain points.
In the 13 problem spaces that I found - spanning through the home page, map, and sign-up - here's an example of 3 major problems stood out:
Users attempting to find reservation location struggle since the buttons do not direct them towards the task they need to do.
Users fail to notice and take advantage of important map features (filter, icons) that would assist their task due to lack of visibility in the default state.
Users are unable to find information here needed to find amenities for a site and resort to detours to find a suitable location, leading to inefficient and lengthy search.
The Solution
After extracting major problem spaces from in the affinity diagram that I found within the Home Page, Map Page, Directory Page, and Reservation/Sign-Up Flow, I generated How-Might-We statements to direct my thinking into ideating solutions for each problem space. For instance...
How might we guide users towards the reservation task?
How might we support quick recognition of map tools?
How might we help users make more quick and informed decisions about listings of picnic sites?
Guided by the How-Might-We statements as well as feedback from interviews, I generated Crazy 8 ideas for each How-Might-We.
Narrowing Down: Shortlisting
Having generated the multitude of pain points as well as possible solutions to address them, I was faced with the issue of narrowing down to the best decisions that I could implement.
To do this, I created shortlists to assess each possible solution variation against constraints of feasibility, desirability, and viability, and user goals.
A zoom in on the process for one HMW, helping users make more informed decisions about a site:
Narrowing Down: Low-Fidelity Prototyping
Upon narrowing down to the possible solutions, I brought a few strong solutions in each solution space into the implementation phase. I began low-fidelity prototyping to construct the layout and positioning of features on a mobile interface as well as combine features of similar functionality to further narrow down my solutions and ideate how they interact in with each other.
Narrowing Down: Usability Testing
Even after low-fidelity prototyping and merging solutions, I was left with a couple of design decisions to make. I conducted another round of usability testing to inform on the best solutions. For instance:
How can I present filtering in the most intuitive and accessible way?
Users most quickly found and understood Filter Option 1: Descriptive Buttons, as it was the most salient and intuitive filtering method.
High-Fidelity Prototyping
After these major design decisions were made and user flow was mapped out, I proceeded to construct high-fidelity prototypes and interactions. I focused on fully developing the more complex interactions involving the date/time selection and filtering views, as these were the most critical changes I had made to the user flow.
The end result: a simplified and streamlined reservation flow, from location selection to sign-up to confirmation, allowing users to efficiently find a picnic location that suits their amenity needs.
Try out the prototype here.