[cpncrunch]

I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable (as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience.

OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader because they were the first to market and their product works well. You can never please everyone, but just because a product doesn't have your pet feature doesn't mean it is "shitty".

[vitd]

My experiences with it are that it is extremely shitty. I often go to it to see if there are any tables at my desired time, and if there are, I manually call the place and book the reservation directly. Whenever I go to it, it tries to push a bunch of unrelated crap to me. No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation. (Does anyone want that?) The UI is horrible and confusing. I avoid it if possible, and only grudgingly use it when I don't have another choice (near wifi, but no cell signal, for example).

[cpncrunch]

>No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation

I'm a spam nazi...if anyone spams me, I'll remember. I see I still have the [e-mail] active, which means they haven't spammed me yet.

I just had another look at their site, and I don't see any UI issues myself. You find the restaurant, choose date, and it shows you the times available. You then just confirm the details and click COMPLETE RESERVATION. Nothing too skanky about that. There are boxes you can tick in the confirmation page to subscribe to updates, but they are unticked by default (at least in Canada, where it is now illegal to sign people up automatically).

[shekyboy]

Think the writer is referring to the restaurant facing side of the software and not the user app/website. Those are much nicer.

[ThomPete]

Yes this has nothing to do with the customer. This has to do with the waiters, hostesses etc who know how to use the system and to get them to us another system would take time to learn.

[cpncrunch]

So what issues are there on the restaurant side?

[ThomPete]

Its not issues its just what people are used to?

[cpncrunch]

But the article says it is "shitty" and that "most hate it". I think it might be due to:

[1] There are issues in all software (bugs, lacking your pet feature, etc), and people like to complain.

[2] The article's author has developed a product in the same space (although it seems to be more of a restaurant website template, rather than a reservation system), so there might be some jealousy there.