Case study:
Asia Tatler – Dining App Development

AsiaTatlerDining.com is the first and only English language restaurant website in Hong Kong to offer both reviews and features from an expert editorial team. The website was born out of Hong Kong Tatler’s Best Restaurants, a bestselling restaurant guide since 1984. AsiaTatlerDining.com’s affiliation with Hong Kong Tatler helps make them the first to know about restaurants, bars, events and news. AsiaTatlerDining.com lists over 400 fine dining restaurants and bars which are reviewed anonymously by a team of food and bar critics.

As more and more mobile apps began appearing in App Store toward the end of 2010, Asia Tatler began exploring opportunities in the mobile app space to increase their exposure. The challenge was to keep the app simple but elegant in order to fit the luxury branding of their existing web site. Also, the Asia Tatler team was already busy running the main website, so they needed a scalable solution that allowed them to manage both the main website and the mobile app effectively and efficiently.

Motherapp worked with Asia Tatler to define the app’s design objectives:

• Reinforce Asia Tatler’s brand image as the essential information source for the Hong Kong’s elite
• Increase Asia Tatler’s ability to create more advertising revenue
• Minimize the extra work load on the editorial and IT team to prepare iPhone app content and meet backend requirements

To clarify potential user needs, we built a fictional persona called “Jim Chong”, a trading company Vice President in Hong Kong. We found that the app should:

• Minimize the time required to find a specific type of restaurant
• Increase the likelihood that guests will like the choice of a restaurant
• Make it easier for users to explore new dining & wine experiences

We designed the app with the following unique solutions to meet both Asia Tatler and the end user’s requirements:

• Convenient One-hand Operation: The app can be used by busy users with just one-hand. We assigned all the key buttons to the lower part of the screen so that users can use it conveniently on the go.
• Brand Matching: The app is elegantly designed to match AsiaTatlerDining.com’s brand.
• Take Me There: We introduced tailer-made features such as a one-click Chinese address so users who don’t speak Chinese can simply show the Chinese address of the restaurant to taxi drivers.
• Graceful Ad Integration: Instead of using intrusive banner ads, ads shows up in the app gracefully as part of the browsing experience.
• API Design: We helped formalize the API with their technical team so that there would clean communication between the app and the server.