A first impression, backed by research.

Starting from scratch

The restaurant was in its early stages with little established brand, so the site had to do two jobs at once: create a strong first impression and make the practical details — story, ambience, menu, contact and access — effortless to find.

Because it would be many guests' very first encounter with the restaurant, the experience needed to feel considered and calm, and it had to earn trust before anyone set foot in the door.

What the client needed

The head chef and owner approached me to design a web app where guests could browse the menu and book a table. Working solo over two weeks and to a set budget, I framed the work around three core tasks a guest should be able to complete without friction:

• Reserve a table — and know, immediately, that the booking went through.
• Find a specific dish and its price without downloading a PDF.
• Find opening hours, location and contact details at a glance.

Benchmarking & a user survey

I began by benchmarking direct and indirect competitor restaurants to learn which conventions were worth emulating and where common sites fell short. A SurveyMonkey survey of 52 respondents then grounded those observations in real behaviour and surfaced concrete friction:

• 27% had difficulty finding reservation pages, opening hours or location.
• 17% believed they had booked a table via an email form when they actually hadn't.
• Guests consistently wanted to see food and interior imagery before deciding.

Watching the friction happen

To pressure-test the survey findings, I ran remote usability tests across three existing restaurant sites. Watching people attempt real tasks confirmed the pain and showed exactly where confidence broke down:

• Bookings that gave no confirmation left users unsure whether anything had happened.
• Phone numbers that didn't stand out were hard to locate when it mattered.
• Users got lost moving between separate contact and booking pages.

From data to user needs

Using an affinity diagram in Miro, I clustered the research into themes around user goals, behaviours and pain points. From those clusters a clear set of design requirements emerged:

• Easy, predictable navigation via a horizontal nav bar.
• Generous imagery of dishes and the interior to set the scene.
• A distinct, unmissable booking option.
• Immediate confirmation the moment details are submitted.
• Key information — hours, location, contact — surfaced upfront.
• A clear, readable on-page menu rather than a downloadable PDF.

Flows, sketches & a mid-fi prototype

I mapped high-level flows for the three priority tasks, then sketched the main screen states before building an interactive medium-fidelity prototype in Adobe XD.

Mid-fidelity was deliberately the right level for this stage: a reduced, near-greyscale palette kept attention on architecture, hierarchy and usability, so decisions were tested on how the site worked before any time was spent on fine visual detail.

Wireframes ready for development

The final step made the design ready to build: a detailed set of annotated wireframes describing every unique interaction, removing ambiguity for the development team and protecting the research-backed decisions through implementation.

From the client: "Sakura has been working remotely with me on my company's website and it has been an absolute pleasure… highly organised and very intuitive in her design work. I couldn't recommend working with her enough!"

Research refines decisions

As my first project after completing my Diploma in UX Design, this deepened my understanding of how research refines decision-making to create genuinely valuable designs.

It also gave me real-world practice balancing solutions against a set budget, a tight timeline and specific client requests — and reinforced that a confident first impression is built on evidence, not guesswork.