Filip Mishevski

Voila

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New recipe for dining. For one of NYC's top 10 restaurants.

Years
2020-2022
Client
The Group
Role
Requirements, brand and interface design, product manager
A spread of around a dozen phone screens from the app: choosing between a quick lunch and a laid-back one, a restaurant page with its menu and Book and Order buttons, the onboarding screens about contactless dining and loyalty, available indoor and outdoor times, a dish opened with its description and quantity, booking a table by day, time and size of party through OpenTable, the booking confirmed, the lunch menu, and the voila mark over its circles.
The full app at one glance.
A wall of pieces from the ordering flow: a dish card for Cotelettes D’agneau Romarin Lamb Chops at 45 dollars with a reservation bar and a Select items button; a drinks list with a slider for when they should arrive; the booking confirmed, with lunch, pre-show and dinner times; the restaurant card for Boucherie West Village; a prompt for your table number; a dine-in prompt; a note that the chef is doing the magic while courses are timed - drinks at 0 to 5 minutes, mains at 35 to 45; the Quick option explained; extras and toppings with prices; a Visa on file; a check totalling 126 dollars; and a cancelled booking reading you will be missed.
The parts it was made of.
Six app screens in sequence: the restaurant list, a restaurant with its menu and Book and Order buttons, booking a table by day, time and size of party, the confirmation reading Booked, we are setting the table, the lunch menu, and a dish opened with quantity and special requirements.
Book a table, order the food, and the bill is already settled.
Four onboarding screens: the voila mark over circles, reading new recipe for dining, with a Get started button; contactless, effortless and worryless dining, over a note about handpicked restaurants in New York; enjoy in the world, with circles for booking, ordering and paying in the app; and rewards to dine with, where a percentage of the service charge comes back as loyalty.
Four screens to explain the whole idea.
The Voila landing page. The headline New recipe for dining sits over a hand holding a phone that shows the Boucherie West Village listing with its menu and Book and Order buttons, with dishes cut out around it. Below, three columns: contactless, effortless and worryless dining; book, order and pay in the app; and loyalty that you can actually see and taste.
Setting the table, on web.
Four web screens in sequence: the voila home page listing four Boucherie restaurants, each with a photograph and a line about it; a restaurant page with its gallery, About and Location tabs and the menu, under Book and Order buttons; step one of three, booking a table by day, time and size of party through OpenTable; and step two, the lunch menu with appetisers, drinks and dessert down the side.
Snapshots from the Voila web app.

A dining app designed for optimisation of the painpoints of the dining experience. Book a table, order the food and settle the bill from your phone — and enjoy the best parts of the experience to the max.

The challenge

The client was one of the largest restaurant groups in New York, and their flagship: La Grande Boucherie was about to be opened for business. Located in one of the densest areas of working people, and having a capacity for nearly 600 people, the restaurant was looking to optimise peak hours - both for the diners and staff. The founder had the idea to shorten the time taken to prep, serve the food and cut out the time needed for payments and come down to a Uber kind of experience.

What started on good solid grounds was quickly shaken by Covid-19. This new, massive challenge (for any restaurant), set the new constraints the design had to answer. It brought big pivots, big risks and potentially some new opportunities - to offer an app for a contactless dining experience.

Contactless, effortless and worry-less

The offer was a selection of handpicked, top restaurants in NYC (starting with all of The Group’s own restaurants) that could be booked, ordered and paid for in the app. The idea was to create a dining experience that could serve a meal within the safety guidelines of the time, with no compromise on either safety or quality. Peace of mind, and then pleasure, without compromises on both.

Eventually, every part of the experience was designed to happen without contact — from booking the table all the way down to ordering the food and paying the check. The line we kept coming back to was: book, order and pay in the app, enjoy in the world, the phone handles the transaction so the table can be about the meal.

How it was built

A mobile app and a web front end, sitting on top of two systems the group already ran on: OpenTable GuestCenter for reservations and Toast POS for ordering and payment. Both are deeply embedded in how the floor already works, which is the point — the staff-side behaviour does not change, so the thing to be adopted is the customer’s phone rather than the restaurant’s process. At the scale of a group, that is the difference between a rollout and a chaos.

The outcome

The app was launched in La Grande Boucherie and then slowly scaled to the rest of the group's restaurants. The app was sunset a couple of years after launch.

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