Why we're refreshing the design of the 'My Easy Eatery' control panel

At Easy Eatery, we're always looking for ways to improve your experience and ensure our platform helps our customer's businesses thrive.

After 18 months of feedback, analysis, and collaboration with our valued customers, I'm thrilled to announce that a significant refresh of the 'My Easy Eatery' control panel is underway.

In this post, I wanted to take the time to explain why this update is happening and how it will set the stage for Easy Eatery's ongoing development.

Full disclosure: There are a whole bunch of screenshots in this article, these are from our Figma project and the final build may differ slightly in some areas.

Taking on board customer feedback

Over the past year and a half, we've met with our customers to understand what works well for them and what could be better, when it comes to our control panel.

We've carefully reviewed how businesses use our tools, and when we noticed that some features were underutilised, we asked ourselves and our customer why, and we've explored ways to help our customers get the most out of Easy Eatery and it's growing toolset of features.

From these conversations and observations, we identified several key areas for improvement:

• Page builder usability: While totally usable if you know what you're doing, the current page builder lacks a live preview function, which makes it harder that it needs to be to see the changes you're making.
• Menu builder efficiency: The menu builder has a product database that was created to help avoid duplicate data entry and to allow items to be reused across multiple menus. However, we found that many of our customers were accidentally duplicating menu items. A few also remarked that creating new menu items while also creating a menu was not as easy as it could be.
• Table reservations enhancements: Since this is a new feature and it has recently been tested to an extreme level, table reservations is actually in quite a good shape. However customers have requested more functionality, in the form of a daily timeline and a 'live tables' view for easier management of bookings.
• Feature discoverability: We've had a couple of messages from customers telling us they didn't realise certain features existed. The current approach of grouping features into distinct tabs discourages exploration of the control panel.

After gathering feedback, analysing usage data, and reflecting on Easy Eatery's development up until now, we decided now is the perfect time for a design refresh.

Our vision for the design refresh

Our primary goal for the refresh is simple: to create a more user-friendly, cohesive, responsive and accessible control panel for Easy Eatery that empowers our customers to get the most from Easy Eatery's suite of tools and features. We're doing this by:

• Addressing usability concerns: Refining workflows for everyday tasks to address pain points raised by our customers and to help save time. We're splitting the more complex areas of the control panel into more manageable sections for better usability.
• Improving the navigation: Replacing the original tabbed navigation with a single list of features grouped by type (Applications, Site Content, Settings, etc.) to encourage exploration of Easy Eatery's feature set.
• Ensure consistency in design: We've established a new design system that streamlines the approach to designing every feature. This will help us create a polished and professional look, simply by adhering to the strict new set of design rules.
• Simplify the UI and reduce clutter: Simplifying page and form layouts by removing unnecessary elements and grammar, avoiding 'boxes within boxes', while adding more white space to create cleaner, more open interfaces. We're also reducing the number of unique design elements and simplifying the remaining elements to keep the platform easy to learn and use.
• Be more mobile-friendly: The current control panel only supports mobile for table reservations and gift vouchers. Our goal for this version is to ensure the entire control panel works seamlessly on a wide range of desktop and mobile devices.

Establishing a new design system

Our new design system is at the heart of the design refresh and underpins every aspect of the redesigned control panel.

We've established clear rules for colours, typography, layout and spacing to ensure consistency across the whole platform. By adhering to these rules, we can eliminate inconsistencies and deliver a polished, professional experience where every page feels part of a cohesive whole.

This is in contrast to the current control panel, where the design language has evolved over time while we added new features. With this new langage however, we can ensure consitency with all new and future features.

Performance and Optimisation

To improve usability, we're removing almost all animations. The only animations to be found will be hover states, faster than before, to provide subtle feedback without distracting from the task at hand. This keeps things feeling snappy and keeps your focus on what you're doing.

Behind the scenes, we've taken this as an opportunity to optimise Easy Eatery's performance for the future. While the platform is already fast, we wanted to ensure it remains that way as it grows. Some of the improvements we made include:

• Removing bloat: We're removing unnecessary CSS and JavaScript, and we have split section-specific code into dedicated files to reduce the size of the main files.
• Optimising styling: We're optimising the CSS to ensure it's clean and efficient by shortening selectors and using shorter class names. The fact that we're loading section-specific CSS separately allows us to further reduce the complexity of CSS selectors, which has a knock-on effect on scripting.
• Icon optimisation: We're redrawing all icons to ensure they're efficiently made and properly scalable. We removed all non-essential markup from SVG icons and added accessibility-friendly attributes such as the role and aria-label tags. Our icon library is over 400 icons and counting.

What's being refreshed?

In short, everything is being fair game — and nothing is sacred. In many cases the design changes are actually pretty minor, simply conforming the pages and forms to the new design system, but there are several areas where we are focusing more time and energy. Here are some of the highlights:

The login screen

I know, so exciting! In all seriousness though, we're refreshing the login screen to add more utility. Whilst logging in is, of course, the primary prupose of the page, we're adding useful links, such as:

• Changelog: To view recent updates to Easy Eatery.
• Roadmap: To view upcoming features.
• Status: To view the current status of our platform.
• Contact us: So you can easily reach out to us.
• Report a bug: In case you spot something that's not right.

We're also adding links to the primary areas of our support portal to help you get the information you need quickly.

Table Reservations

The table reservations feature is receiving a comprehensive enhancement. In addition to a general polish, we are refining the design of booking tiles to make key details more accessible at a glance. This includes clearer indicators for booking status, unpaid deposits, table assignment issues, and any notes or messages.

We’re also introducing a new daily timeline view and a live tables view to help you visualise and manage bookings more effectively throughout the day. Alongside these visual updates, we’re implementing workflow improvements to streamline booking management, saving you valuable time during your busiest moments.

Gift vouchers

The gift voucher sales tools are also getting some attention, with a subtle polish to refine what is already working well in practice. We’re refreshing the design and enhancing the user experience across the board to make it even more intuitive and efficient.

A key addition is the introduction of email deliverability failure notifications, which will alert you if a voucher email fails to reach its recipient, enabling you to take swift action.

Looking ahead, we’re exploring the introduction of a custom voucher feature. This would allow restaurant owners to create one-off vouchers with bespoke pricing or entitlements, such as issuing credit notes, offering even greater flexibility.

Page builder

The page builder has been entirely redesigned from the ground up to deliver a more engaging and intuitive experience. Drawing on everything we’ve learned, we’ve developed a fresh approach that simplifies the process of creating and editing pages.

The addition of a near real-time preview ensures you can see your changes as you make them, making the entire workflow more straightforward and seamless.

Menu builder

As we mentioned earlier, the menu builder includes a product database designed to prevent duplicate data entry and enable items to be reused across multiple menus. However, with the original process of adding menu items, we found that many customers were unintentionally re-creating existing items instead of reusing them.

To address this, we’ve completely redesigned the workflow for adding new items. Now, to add an item to a menu, you simply begin typing the name of the item. You'll be shown any existing menu items that match the entered name. With just one click, you can then reuse an existing item, or choose to create a new menu item instantly.

We also received feedback that creating new menu items while building a menu wasn’t as intuitive as it could be. To resolve this, we’re rebuilding the menu builder from the ground up. The new approach will seamlessly integrate the creation of new items into the menu builder, drastically simplifying workflows and making menu management more user-friendly than before.

Customer feedback

Easy Eatery’s customer feedback feature, which uses the flexibility of our form builder to gather valuable insights from your customers, is getting a major update. While it’s not a feature we often highlight, we’ve completely refreshed its design to enhance both usability and value.

The redesigned feedback system now includes a new dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of recent submissions alongside aggregate and average ratings. This makes it easier than ever to monitor feedback and identify trends in customer satisfaction.

These updates also pave the way for future integrations with table reservations, enabling exciting possibilities like automated follow-up surveys (e.g., “How was your visit?”), giving you even more tools to connect with your customers and improve their experience.

What's new?

Alongside these design refreshes, we're introducing entirely new features:

SEO Manager

The new SEO Manager will allow site owners to quickly edit the SEO content of pages, menus, blog posts, and gift vouchers from a single location. While it's already possible edit SEO content on pages and posts individually, this tool is designed to make improving your site's visibility in search results as straightforward as possible.

Redirects manager

With the Redirects Manager, you'll be able to quickly redirect traffic from old URLs to new destinations, perfect if you're suspending your main menu whilst you run a new seasonal offering, using this feature you can redirect traffic from your normal menu to the new one seamlessly. This feature will help you maintain search rankings and provide a seamless experience for visitors as your site evolves.

User roles

User roles will be added in the next patch. This will replace access permissions currently set on a per-user basis to provide more control and flexibility over your team's ability to make changes. You'll be able to create a role, give that role permissions and then assign roles to your team members.

Demonstrating return on investment

We know that demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) from Easy Eatery is vitally important to our longterm success. That's why we're introducing new features to clarify how our platform delivers value each and every day.

• Earnings tracking for table reservations: You'll be able to set a typical spend per cover, giving you insights into the revenue generated by Easy Eatery's tools, and you'll be able to see where the revenue has come from, online vs offline bookings, for example.
• Commission-free savings: With our pricing model, you save significantly compared to platforms that take a commission. Our new tools will show you exactly how much you're saving and earning each day.

When to Expect the Update

We're committed to delivering this update to the highest standard. While there isn't a set date we have in mind to go live, we're already building the new control panel and rigorously testing it as we go, to ensure it is responsive, accessible, and performant. in short, once it's ready, we'll roll it out.

To help your team transition smoothly, we're preparing videos detailing the changes and showcasing new workflows. Most updates refine existing processes, so the transition should be intuitive and straightforward.

Looking Ahead

We're incredibly excited to deliver this redesign. It's a massive step forward for Easy Eatery, and we can't wait to see its positive impact on your business.

I also wanted to thank our customers for your continued support and feedback. Easy Eatery simply wouldn't be what it is today without you, and we're committed to making the platform even better for you.

Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback.