Case Studies

Mike Rapp

Mike Rapp

How I helped double the potential revenue of the world's largest largest beach seating reservation system

Research

User Interviews

Native Tablet

API Integrations

Accessibility

Details

Role: Senior Designer

Time frame: 3 months

Responsibilities: Research, wireframing, user interviews, prototyping, high fidelity interaction design

Responsibilities: Research, wireframing, user interviews, prototyping, high fidelity interaction

Collaborators: Product manager, engineering, business and sales

Background

America's beachfront business space is a huge money-maker for seaside businesses, but comes with unique challenges and constraints.

Every year, an estimated $2.3 billion changes hands on America's beaches—and a significant portion of that is spent reserving chairs on beaches.

Beachy effectively owns America's beach seat reservation business, with clients up and down the eastern seaboard and the Florida gulf coast. Beachy's proprietary GPS-driven eCommerce system gives vacationers the ability to reserve a beach seat, so they don't have to drag their own chairs back and forth across a busy highway.

Beachy's business was constrained by the warm-weather realities of their clientele. So the goal was to use their domination of the beach seat reservation business to offer food to their patrons, while they are at the beach.

The up side was self-evident: By adding food and beverage sales, Beachy could effectively double or even triple its gross revenues.

Every year, an estimated $2.3 billion changes hands on America's beaches—and a significant portion of that is spent reserving chairs on beaches.

Beachy effectively owns America's beach seat reservation business, with clients up and down the eastern seaboard and the Florida gulf coast. Beachy's proprietary GPS-driven eCommerce system gives vacationers the ability to reserve a beach seat, so they don't have to drag their own chairs back and forth across a busy highway.

Beachy's business was constrained by the warm-weather realities of their clientele. Our business goal was to use their seat reservation business as a platform to sell and deliver food to their seat location.

The up side was self-evident: By adding food and beverage sales, Beachy could effectively double or even triple its gross revenues.

The Business Problem

Beach attendants use the Beachy native tablet app to check patrons into their reserved seat via Beachy's custom-designed beach maps.

Beach attendants work in one of the most difficult environments imaginable. Not only are they dealing with the glare and heat of direct sunlight—their fingers are constantly covered with sand and sun screen.

Attendants also face the challenges of mobile real-time eCommerce, as well as sudden weather changes and the transient nature of both vacationing beachgoers and hiring college students on summer break.

But the biggest constraint was the existing Beachy App itself.

My engineering team told me that he seating reservation system was simply not scalable enough to concurrently run food service.

You see, beach seats were the same from one beach to the next—they didn't include complexities like random menu items, timed pre-ordering, delivery, and server tips.

This set of constraints truly required a carefully-considered, well-researched solution that would work well for all stakeholders and users. So I took a trip to the beach.

Constraints

Beach attendants work in one of the most difficult environments imaginable. Not only are they dealing with direct sunlight—which makes seeing the tablet screen challenging—their fingers are constantly covered with sand and sun screen.

They're also dealing with the challenges around mobile real-time eCommerce, sudden weather changes, and the transient nature of the vacationing beachgoer.

But the biggest constraint was the existing Beachy App itself. My engineering team told me that he seating reservation system was simply not scalable enough to concurrently run food service.

You see, beach seats were the same from one beach to the next—they didn't include complexities like random menu items, timed pre-ordering, delivery, and server tips.

This set of constraints truly required a carefully-considered, well-researched solution that would work well for all stakeholders and users. So I took a trip to the beach.

Beach attendants work in one of the most difficult environments imaginable. Not only are they dealing with direct sunlight, their fingers are constantly covered with sand and sun screen.

They're also dealing with the challenges around mobile real-time eCommerce, sudden weather changes, and the transient nature of the traditional beachside workforce.

But the biggest constraint was the existing Beachy App itself. My engineering team told me that he seating reservation system was simply not scalable enough to concurrently run food service.

Beach seats were the same from one beach to the next—they didn't have complexities like random menu items, timed pre-ordering, delivery, and server tips.

This set of constraints required a carefully-considered, well-researched solution that would work well for all stakeholders and users.

Beach attendants work in one of the most difficult environments imaginable. Not only are they dealing with the glare and heat of direct sunlight—their fingers are constantly covered with sand and sun screen.

Attendants also face the challenges of mobile real-time eCommerce, as well as sudden weather changes and the transient nature of both vacationing beachgoers and hiring college students on summer break.

But the biggest constraint was the existing Beachy App itself.

My engineering team told me that he seating reservation system was simply not scalable enough to concurrently run food service.

You see, beach seats were the same from one beach to the next—they didn't include complexities like random menu items, timed pre-ordering, delivery, and server tips.

This set of constraints truly required a carefully-considered, well-researched solution that would work well for all stakeholders and users. So I took a trip to the beach.

Environmental conditions on sun-drenched, sand-blown beaches create one of the most challenging user scenarios imaginable.

Research

To better educate myself on the future users of Beachy Food & Beverage, I took a trip to the Florida panhandle.

I interviewed beach attendants across the panhandle of Florida, and asked them to let me watch them use Beachy App.

There I met with beach attendants, their managers, and beach-going patrons to learn how Beachy could best meet their needs. I learned about the unique pain points that accompany any beachfront business—and what challenges we would have to overcome to build a successful food and beverage business.

Key findings:

Food servers often have to walk across a busy highway to pick up and deliver food to beachgoers.

Tips are a significant pain point for servers, as often managers expect to share in that revenue.

Turtle nesting season impacts where and when servers can access many Florida beaches.

Beach seat managers —who are usually college students—did not want food servers to have access to the seat reservation app.

The A-ha moment that inspired the redesign

During my on-site interviews, I uncovered a strange user issue: About one in five beach attendants chose to not use the very-visual Beachy touch map. Often it seemed they didn't understand when I asked them things like, Tap the orange button.

I returned to Nashville with a hunch quickly discovered the problem: The beach map was invisible to those who were colorblind. This fatal accessibility issue made the launch of a food and beverage app within the existing mapping UI a no-go. Given that Beachy's entire business model was based on the seat mapping UI, I knew we had to find a solution that would both align with our business needs—and meet the accessibility requirements of our users.

My design research included businesses that operated in similar constraints. I looked specifically at a new restaurant reservation company called Resy, which had just inked a pilot deal with Nashville's James Beard Award wining resaurant Husk. I convinced the general manager to spend an afternoon with me and my product manager, Pete Peltier, and he demoed what was the most elegant, feature-packed app I had ever seen.

User research proved that the existing Beachy beach map was designed with a color palette that made its most defining feature—the touch beach seat map—invisible to those who are color blind.

I returned to Beachy's Music Row office and got to work. Armed with both beachside user feedback and a rich understanding of the market, I led the design of a new beach map UI concept that accentuated high contrast and direct sunlight.

I came back to Beachy's Music Row office, and began to create a new high contrast color palette that would read well in the tough lighting and weather scenarios in which Beachy had to excel. I also collaborated with the engineering team, imagining a new map user interface that could cooperate with the existing mapping technology—while displaying an entirely new interactive experience.

Design and Interation

During my competitive research, I discovered a startup restaurant reservation system called Resy—founded by famous startup funder Gary Vaynerchuck. Resy was taking on restaurant titan Open Table with a new UX concept that relied on a modern, high contrast user interface. Local James Beard Award winning restaurant Husk was demoing Resy in Nashvile, so I called the GM and asked for a look under the hood.

My design research included businesses that operated in similar constraints. I looked specifically at a new restaurant reservation company called Resy, which had just inked a pilot deal with Nashville's James Beard Award wining resaurant Husk. I convinced the general manager to spend an afternoon with me and my product manager, Pete Peltier, and he demoed what was the most elegant, feature-packed app I had ever seen.

While on my fact-finding mission in Destin, Florida, Beachy founder David Stange and I sketched out ideas for the new Beachy user interface on the paper tablecloth of a local seafood restaurant.

Inspired by Resy's elegant interaction design, and in collaboration with my engineering team, we created a user experience that elegantly addressed Beachy's business requirements, and exceeded the highest expectations of their seaside users.

I came back to Beachy's Music Row office, and began to create a new high contrast color palette that would read well in the tough lighting and weather scenarios in which Beachy had to excel. I also collaborated with the engineering team, imagining a new map user interface that could cooperate with the existing mapping technology—while displaying an entirely new interactive experience.

Accessible color palette

The new Beachy user interface featured a high-contrast color palette that accentuated accessibility in Beachy's tough environmental user scenario.

Change order status

Servers can now change the status of a food oder by tapping a seat icon.

Sort and filter by order status

Beachy servers can now sort her seat map by order status—giving her a real-time view of the most important data in the moment.

Menu Ordering

Servers could load a custom menu that was set up with a special admin app.

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Open To Work

Let’s talk about what you’re building and how I might be able to help.

Open To Work

Let’s talk about what you’re building and how I might be able to help.

Open To Work

Let’s talk about what you’re building and how I might be able to help.

Open To Work

Let’s talk about what you’re building and how I might be able to help.