Multimedia Designer & Creator
Multimedia Designer & Creator
All Day started as a concept I had over the summer, after speaking with individuals at a restaurant based in Toronto about their struggles and hardships in adapting to Covid-19. It started with reviewing their current reservation app, and turned into a piece I created and developed a prototype for during my time at OCAD.
All Day – Refers to the total number of a particular menu item. “4 steaks are ordered at table 20 and 3 are ordered at table 11. That means that 7 steaks were ordered all day.”
It is a reminder and, at the same time, a check on ingredients that may be running short.
How might we provide confidence & control for workers in the restaurant industry who need to adapt to frequent & fast changes in environments & regulations?
This is the first pandemic the world has gone through since nightlife and large-group socializing has become the norm for societies everywhere. Through every application developed in history, none have been made with the consideration of a pandemic with health & safety regulations in place. Restaurants are some of the most gravely affected by the pandemic, and they need more tools created with their daily struggles in mind.
The restaurant industry is struggling to keep up with both the constant changing state of regulations amidst the pandemic, and providing great service to customers.
This application will serve as a solution to provide businesses with confidence and control to carry on and focus on what they need to during unprecedented times.
Reservations are displayed in chronological order, table chart is customizable in the settings tab of the app to reflect an accurate representation of the restaurant floor plan, with the tab option to view indoor dining vs. Outdoor patio (important during Covid as some restaurants entirely shut down indoor dining and focused on outdoor over the summer)
The use of colour in a minimal and methodical way helps reduce any visual confusion for the user. There is a very simple colour palette, using green and grey as the primary colour for information, and yellow for more important information/actions/alerts for the user to consider.
All Day aims to minimize the need for staff/owners to physically need to go into the restaurant to access a tablet or computer for more information regarding customers, seating, reported cases, etc. It can be signed into from anyone’s device, which can potentially reduce the need for a shared tablet system at a restaurant, should the employee’s choose to mainly use this application on their personal devices. If so, this would ultimately minimize interaction with a shared surface which helps also minimize risk of exposure.
Using streamlined icons with recognizable language in the restaurant industry reduces the learning curve for new users. All Day is built with the perspective of the user in mind, by using this typical restaurant terminology (such as the term “reso” or block periods).
All actions developed in All Day are formulated to follow a specific line of steps in order to achieve success/completion. Within the settings and during account set-up process, these steps can be altered and refined to fit the business’s operations. Ultimately this forces the user through the same steps in order to do things like booking a reso, reporting a Covid-19 case, or viewing any information (i.e. having to set a date range in order to pull up a seating report).
It has been standard for all reservation applications to prompt for customer contact information upon for fill-outs. All Day has implemented additional fields for more thorough information, or additional names on a booking. This was made with the current government mandates (since Covid-19) in mind for businesses to collect contact information of every customer.