When you think of Zomato, you probably think of discovering the next great place to eat. As a company, we work hard to put detailed, relevant restaurant information at your fingertips. But a little known fact is we get a lot of help from our partners around the world — restaurant owners.

I’m part of a team that works on Zomato for Business, a platform for our restaurant owners. As a designer, my job is to cater to the needs of restaurant owners and delight them. As a product manager, my job is to see that the Zomato for Business (ZFB) product brings them more business.

To design for the restaurant community is to understand them — who they are, what they do, and simply, why they open their restaurant every day. Over the past few months, the ZFB team met with several restaurant owners in the Delhi-NCR area to understand their story.

If I were to group restaurant owners into personas (or mindsets), there are three types we work with in India (since it’s where we’ve begun).

• The first type of restaurant owner runs a chain of restaurants, and has little time for specific outlets. This owner employs a marketing team to manage their restaurants on Zomato, and gets their help on marketing choices and which ad platforms to target.
• The second type of owner runs a standalone establishment, to which they dedicate all of their time. This owner is tech-savvy and values the convenience of updating restaurant information from an app. This owner owns and manages all the marketing, and adds their voice to the restaurant’s Zomato page and interactions.
• A third type of owner runs a low-margin, high output chain and immerses themselves in the food experience. This person manages their restaurant with a hands-on approach, improving efficiency by working alongside the team. This owner does not have a high affinity to using technology, or may not view an app as the best way to identify issues and solve them. This owner markets the brand by consistently delivering excellent food.

These are very broad, and there could be many more types of restaurant owners around the world! To start, we decided to focus on persona #2 — the owner who depends on technology for restaurant health. We figured if we can cater to persona #2 before moving onto personas #1 and #3, we could bring ZFB to a great place.

One of the persona #2 owners we met told us that he quit a 9-to-5 job to start his restaurant. “I’ve always been interested in food, and finally decided to make the jump into the restaurant industry. I was a business analyst in my previous job, so I know the importance of using numbers to run my business. On an everyday basis, I look at things from P-to-P — from procurement of materials to paying my staff. And at the end of the day, the feedback from my customers is the most important thing. If their feedback isn’t good, then I need to work on my food and my business, and I’m ready to do that.”

Catering to this persona means effectively transforming Zomato for Business into a restaurant assistant. An assistant that shows relevant content at the right time, to help a busy owner make educated decisions. To move towards the idea of an assistant, we’ve made a couple of big changes to the mobile apps over the past few months. I’ll take you through a few examples.

Example 1: Improving accessibility throughout the app

• Why it’s important: Restaurant owners are busy people. They handle everything from opening the store, to logistics, to billing, and creating high-quality food. We want to give busy restaurant owners an easy-to-digest snapshot of how things are going.
• What we did: For version 1, we focused on decluttering. Removing descriptive content and replacing it with actionable content. Segregating content between new features and current ones. Reducing the number of taps before an owner can create or consume content.

Example 2: Making Analytics and Online Ordering information more real-time, and exposing other Zomato products

• Why it’s important: We noticed that the tech-savvy persona #2 users need more from our platform to manage their business. One owner told us, “Around 11 pm each evening, I look back at how the business has done, and plan ahead for the next day. It would be useful to have a way to quantify how well we did. How much money we made that day, and where we lost out.” Feedback from owners helped us understand that Zomato for Business must serve as a real-time indicator for restaurant health. It should also reflect how well the owner is utilizing the Zomato platform and how they can get more out of it.
• What we did: We added a feed for their Online Ordering history, and the revenue from each order. We are also adding more meat to the Analytics section (which is still being developed — more on that soon!). We also presented our other products unobtrusively, using the sliding carousel within the app.

Example 3: Revamping the look of the app to be more elegant.

• Why it’s important: About a month ago, the team was talking about how restaurant owners feel using Zomato, and we were using the phrase ‘restaurant pride’. We noticed that gold and white have been traditionally used as colours to communicate premium experiences, so we wanted to use a colour palette that would allow us to do that.
• What we did: We moved the ZFB app color scheme to a gold-white-black theme. It’s a small change, but it has dramatically changed the tone of the app once opened. Sometimes, small adjustments can lead to a larger change in perception (or so we hope!).

What’s next?

We are heading towards a Zomato for Business product that is a well-crafted and easily understandable tool to manage a restaurant on Zomato. Doing user research with real restaurant owners has helped us stand in their shoes and figure out what matters to them, and the challenges they face that we need to help overcome.

As long as we continue to design with owners and provide more relevant data that is contextual and “smart”, we will soon provide a pretty compelling assistant. So for now, it’s time to get back to learning more about persona #2, our tech-savvy entrepreneurial restaurant owner.