Highlights
- Achieving Production-Ready Quality Through Rigorous Validation: our team delivered a completely redesigned reservation application that passed two rounds of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with no major defects, reaching production-ready quality.
- Delivering Usability Without Training: restaurant host staff, including those already familiar with the legacy system, were able to complete core reservation workflows without any application-specific training or step-by-step guidance.
- Modernizing Complex Business Logic Into a Simple Experience: we translated a dense set of restaurant operating rules, including service periods, pacing, turn time, table eligibility, and conflict handling, into an interface that hides this complexity from front-of-house staff.
- Maximizing Value Within a Tight Budget: our team continuously prioritized scope around essential restaurant workflows, deliberately removing lower-value legacy functionality rather than defaulting to a full feature-for-feature rebuild.
Client
Our client is TouchBistro, a Canadian B2B SaaS company operating in the restaurant management and hospitality industry. The company built an all-in-one POS and restaurant management system designed to make running a restaurant easier, serving restaurant operators with a connected ecosystem spanning point-of-sale, online ordering, reservations, and floor-plan management.
Product
SPD Technology partnered with TouchBistro to replace the company’s legacy iPad reservation application with a fully redesigned reservation platform. The new solution needed to maintain compatibility with TouchBistro’s existing backend while modernizing the front-of-house experience and keeping reservation data synchronized with the broader POS and floor-plan ecosystem in real time.
The key product components include:
- Mobile App for iOS/iPad: built with React Native, chosen specifically to enable future reuse across Android as the platform expands beyond its initial iPad target.
- Web Solution for Back-Office Configuration: enabling restaurant operators to manage configuration and reservation settings.
- POS and Online Reservation Integration: keeping reservation and floor-plan data synchronized, so changes to a table’s status in the POS immediately reflect in the reservation application, and vice versa.
Staff working the floor rarely deal with one reservation channel at a time. The platform pulls all of them, online bookings included, into a single view. When two reservations collide or nothing’s available, that gets flagged right away instead of surfacing as a confused double-booking later. And if a host jumps from today’s list to next week’s floor plan and back, the reservation they were mid-edit on is still sitting right where they left it — nothing resets, nothing’s lost, even in the middle of a busy service, which is exactly when host and front-of-house staff have the least room to spare for software that asks them to stop and think.
Goals and objectives
- Replace the Aging Reservation Application: retire the legacy iPad app in favor of a modern, maintainable architecture built for future expansion.
- Significantly Improve Usability: design an experience restaurant staff could operate without application-specific training.
- Reduce Friction in Daily Restaurant Workflows: streamline common tasks like reservation creation, table assignment, and walk-in management.
- Preserve Backend Compatibility and Existing Reservation Concepts: ensure the redesigned app worked seamlessly with TouchBistro’s existing backend and historical reservation logic, avoiding a disruptive rebuild of surrounding systems.
- Define a Focused MVP: prioritize essential restaurant workflows over recreating every legacy feature, delivering maximum customer value within budget constraints.
Project challenge
- Legacy System Compatibility: the application was undergoing a complete redesign, yet still needed to integrate cleanly with TouchBistro’s existing backend and historical reservation concepts.
- Complex Restaurant Business Rules: the product had to correctly account for a dense web of interdependent rules, including operating hours, service periods, shifts, availability overrides, pacing, turn time, party size, table eligibility, reservations crossing operational periods, and conflicts.
- UX Complexity Versus Simplicity: the underlying restaurant rules were intricate, but host staff needed to create reservations without ever having to understand that complexity themselves.
- Modernization Versus Existing Behavior: the team had to introduce a new architecture and interface while staying faithful to reservation concepts and workflows staff already relied on, balancing meaningful change with familiar, dependable behavior.
- Budget Constraints: the project operated under tight limits, which meant the team couldn’t simply reproduce every function of the legacy system. Scope had to be continuously evaluated. Some functionality didn’t make the cut.
Solution
Our collaboration began with a discovery phase, where our Product Manager worked directly with TouchBistro’s developers, UX designer, customer-facing team, and internal stakeholders, reporting to TouchBistro’s Senior Product Manager. This phase included competitive research, product definition, requirements gathering, PRD development, roadmap planning, MVP definition, and ongoing scope prioritization.
To deliver the redesigned application, we assembled a focused team of two React Native and React developers, a Next.js developer, and a Product Manager, working alongside two of TouchBistro’s own full-stack developers, a designer, and a product manager. This close, cross-functional setup allowed both teams to align quickly on priorities as the project evolved.
The core of the technical solution centered on the application’s availability logic. When a host creates a reservation, for example for a party of two, the system needed to determine the next available time and table by working through a chain of interdependent restaurant rules, from operating hours and service period through pacing, turn time, and table and party eligibility, before surfacing a valid option. Our team built this logic to run invisibly behind a simple interface, so host staff never needed to understand the underlying rule chain to complete a booking.
List and Floorplan used to be two separate ways of doing the same job, which meant host staff had to remember which view had the answer they needed. We brought them together into one experience instead. And the sync ran both directions with TouchBistro’s POS — change a table’s status at the register, and the reservation app reflected it immediately, no refresh, no lag, no gap where staff were working off stale information.
Scope was never something the team settled once and moved on from. Working within what the budget actually allowed, we kept redefining a focused MVP alongside TouchBistro rather than reproducing the legacy system’s full feature set — the workflows that delivered real value to host staff stayed in, and everything else got deferred or cut, deliberately and continuously, all the way through delivery.
Validation was handled through two structured UAT cycles, with our team managing scenario preparation for both rounds. Rather than testing rigid, step-by-step scripts, the team evaluated whether restaurant staff could complete real workflows successfully on their own, even staff already familiar with the legacy application.
Tech Stack
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React -
React Native -
Ruby -
Next.js
Our results
Our team successfully delivered a completely redesigned reservation application that replaced TouchBistro’s legacy iPad experience while preserving compatibility with existing backend systems and restaurant business logic.
- Two Successful UAT Cycles With No Major Defects: the application passed both rounds of User Acceptance Testing, validating both its stability and its alignment with real restaurant workflows.
- Production-Ready Quality: the application reached a level of quality and stability ready for production use.
- Intuitive Enough to Skip Training Entirely: restaurant staff, including those who already knew the legacy application, navigated the redesigned experience and completed key workflows unaided, a particularly meaningful result given how deeply staff habits were tied to the old system.
- Scope Delivered Within Budget: by focusing on high-value restaurant workflows and continuously trimming lower-value scope, our team delivered a functionally complete MVP within a constrained budget rather than defaulting to a costly full rebuild.
The project concluded following TouchBistro’s internal budget reprioritization. The redesigned application had already demonstrated strong stakeholder feedback and validated usability at the time the engagement wrapped.
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