| Shake Shack (http://shakeshack.com on mobile device or http://shakeshack.com/mobile/) is an example of a beautifully designed, minimal, useful mobile web site. Mobile websites are more than putting a mobile template on. Contrast Shake Shack with Walmart's http://walmart.com (on a mobile device) > However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers. > Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run. Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness.
It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting. For a credible, sexy Open Table competitor: check out http://averoinc.com Note: Some comments taken out of context from the threads linked below. I linked to these threads because they contain some good previous discussions about the restaurant industry and their systems. OpenTable is a reservation system (as refulgentis has pointed out). These comments taken out of context from previous related discussions on News.YC: "The hell that is a restaurant website" http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419 "Is OpenTable worth it?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689 "Why are restaurant websites so bad?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044259 |
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The mobile site is kinda cute but a mess in terms of usability:
On http://shakeshack.com/mobile/menu/ links are not marked.
On http://shakeshack.com/mobile/locations/ everything looks like a link.
On eg http://shakeshack.com/mobile/menu/citifield.php the categories are not divided well, it is not clear where the category "text icons" belong to.
http://shakeshack.com/mobile/shackfans/ is serving huge (multiple hundreds of kilobytes) photos.
I would not call that a good example. The idea and structure is good(!) but execution is not so great.