What did Dineout find out so interesting in CanvasFlip!
Every company that got associated with CanvasFlip has an interesting and fruitful experience. Are you wondering how a naive player won so many hearts? Let’s peep into one such story.
Introducing to you:
Contact Person: Manish Shara, Senior Product Manager at Dineout
Company: Dineout
Website: http://www.dineout.co.in/
Industry: Restaurant table reservation service
Location: Noida, India
Background:
Started by four food lovers residing in four different parts of the world, from land and sea- Ankit (London), Sahil (Seattle), Nikhil (Delhi), and Vivek (British Petroleum owned ships), DINEOUT is India’s premier table reservation platform, operating out of 8 cities, with a listing of over 20,000 restaurants, and real-time reservation enabled at over 2300 outlets across the country.
Dineout seats more than 100,000 diners per month across its network. Furthermore, Dineout has a unique first-of-its-kind diner wallet, where it isn’t just points, but actual cash given on transactions like check-ins, reviews and referrals, which is transferable to a paytm wallet.
They are indeed your “coolest friend in town”!
Challenges:
The founders of Dineout had a crystal clear vision when they started a few years back - They wanted the reservation process at restaurants to be a completely automated one and any diner looking out for perfect evening should be offered the best user experience. But guess what, somewhere down the line they were not very satisfied by the user experience response.
Going back in the timeline, before Dineout started using CanvasFlip, they were using Balsamiq to get the flow of their app. But unfortunately they could not achieve the desired response. Perhaps the reason for this was the lack of proper feedback. This was a pinching concern for the company for quite some time.
Person1: Hey dude I have designed the app, please come while I present it tomorrow.
Person2: Ya that’s a sure thing dude.
Person1: Hey you never turned up. Not many did. The ones who turned up gave feedback’s but it’s all so subjective.
Person2: Ya got stuck with work. I wish you could share it over the net so that the team could check it and give you the most accurate feedback pinpointing the areas.
Person1: Well you know that’s not an option.
These were few common incidents, before CanvasFlip came up with the feature of sharing the designed app with your entire team. This feature ensures comments being marked on the place of concern and followed by discussions on it.
Solutions:
CanvasFlip provided a canvas which helped them visualize the complete look and feel of the app. When we reached out to Dineout with the solution to their problem, they were very excited to try CanvasFlip.
With CanvasFlip, they were not only able to develop high fidelity prototype but also they could now record the user experience right at the prototyping stage. (How nice it would be if in Kindergarden I knew that I was going to be my school topper in the tenth!)
UX team of Dineout used this recorded data to understand shortcomings in user experience on current designs and iterated over designs to improve user experience even before they started to build the app.
“If students know the classroom is a safe place to make mistakes, they are more likely to use feedback for learning”
Results:
Emphasizing on the importance of feedback and wise prediction CanvasFlip has been able to win heart of Dineout.
(And we love to keep on repeating this!)
When asked how Dineout employees are feeling about CanvasFlip, Manish Said:
“By considering the importance of feedback in development stage, you ensure the likelihood of obtaining desired use of the app. By getting the list of drawbacks the designing team is able to tighten the loose ends. Then of course quality drives success.”
Recommendation:
We asked Manish again about what he would tell another company asking about CanvasFlip. He said:
“Once you’ve prioritized the issues, you need to make sure that the most salient features are found on the interface. CanvasFlip helps you do this. It helps you visualize the outcome and amend accordingly.”
Winning hearts to be continued in the next post….