Hospitality
3-Sided Platform
Greenfield
Paid Client
Bookies: Designing Nigeria's all-in-one hospitality booking platform across three user sides
A greenfield design of Bookies — a platform where Nigerians can discover and book restaurants, hotels, and clubs in one place. Designed from scratch across three complete product surfaces: the consumer booking experience, the vendor dashboard, and the admin control panel.
Role
Solo Product Designer
Platform
Web + Responsive
Tools
Figma
Users
3 user types
OVERVIEW
The gap in the Nigerian hospitality market
Discovering and booking a great restaurant, hotel, or club experience in Nigeria is a fragmented process. You might find a restaurant on Instagram, check reviews on Google, call to make a reservation, and hope for the best. Hotels require navigating multiple booking aggregators. Clubs and venues have no digital booking infrastructure at all. There's no single trusted platform where a Nigerian can discover, compare, and book any hospitality experience end to end.
Bookies was conceived to close that gap — a single platform covering restaurants, hotels, and clubs, with a booking experience clean enough that Nigerians would trust it with their plans and their money.
"The brief was ambitious: design a platform that does for Nigerian hospitality what OpenTable did for restaurants and Booking.com did for hotels — but for all three verticals, in one product, for one market."
The three verticals
Restaurants, hotels, and clubs. One unified experience
Each vertical on Bookies has distinct booking logic, distinct listing anatomy, and distinct user expectations. Designing all three to feel like one coherent product — not three different apps stitched together — required a strong shared design system and careful decisions about where each vertical diverges.
Restaurant
Browse by cuisine, price range, and location. View restaurant profile with photos, menu, and available reservation slots. Pre-select starter, main, and dessert before arriving. Specify special occasions and seating preferences. Confirm reservation and receive booking ID.
Hotels
Browse hotels with price per night, ratings, and booking count. View property detail page with photo grid, amenities, policies, and map. Select room type from categorised options (Superior Deluxe, Executive, Suite, Presidential) with individual amenities and availability. Reserve with check-in/out, guests, and room type.
Clubs & Venues
Discover nightlife experiences with event type tags (Afrobeat, Live DJ, Ladies Night). Browse by open now status. View venue details with ticket pricing and capacity. Book table or event access for a specific night. Designed to serve a user type with completely different expectations to the restaurant or hotel consumer.
CONSUMER EXPERIENCE
The user-facing booking platform
The consumer homepage opens with a cinematic full-bleed hero and a unified search bar. Three tabs (Restaurant, Hotel, Club) with destination, date, and guest fields beneath. This single search component is the most important design element on the platform: it establishes the breadth of the product in one gesture and routes the user to the right vertical without requiring them to navigate away from the homepage first.
Homepage · Search bar
The unified search bar with three vertical tabs is a deliberate product statement. A user doesn't need to know whether Bookies does restaurants or hotels, they select the tab and just search. The tab selection happens after intent is expressed, not before it.
Restaurant booking · Pre-select meal flow
The pre-select meal feature is the most distinctive element of the restaurant booking flow. Before arriving, the user selects their starter, main course, and dessert from the restaurant's menu. This transforms a reservation from a time-slot confirmation into a genuine dining experience that begins before the guest walks through the door. It also gives restaurants operational intelligence, they know what's being ordered before service begins.
Confirmation page · Details
The reservation confirmation page shows the full meal selection, special requests, and two operational instructions: "You will receive a confirmation email with your reservation details" and "Please, arrive 10 mins early." That second line is a small but important detail , it sets expectations, reduces no-shows, and gives the experience a personal, considered feel that generic booking confirmations lack.
Hotel · Room selection
The Rooms tab on hotel detail pages shows each room type as a full card , photo carousel, room name, amenity chips (Free WiFi, Free Breakfast, Free Parking, City View), availability count ("3 rooms left"), cancellation policy, discounted vs original price, and a Reserve Room CTA. Every piece of information a user needs to make a confident room decision is present without requiring an additional click.
VENDOR SECTION
The business management layer
The vendor section allows respective businesses to manage their reservations, manage their menus and all respective branches. This section is extremely crucial to how the business can best serve their clients.
VENDOR · DASHBOARD
The dashboard shows the vendor an holistical view of what is happening across their businesses. For a restaurant, they can see the reservations they have coming in daily, Customers who already made payments for their reservations and other relevant analytics.
VENDOR · MENU MANAGEMENT
The menu section allows user full control of their menu, they can see all their available menu and menu items. They can also create, make menu inactive. They have full control of what the user sees with this section.
VENDOR · STAFF MANAGEMENT
This staff section also gives the business full control over their staff information, they can see relevant metrics like No-show staffs, inactive staff, etc. They can also add a staff, and assign staff to branch of their choosing.
ADMIN SECTION
Platform-wide oversight and control
The vendor dashboard gives restaurant, hotel, and club operators a dedicated workspace to manage their presence on Bookies. The dark teal sidebar navigation establishes a clear visual separation from the consumer experience — operators are in a different mode, doing a different job.
Key sections include booking management with status-filtered views, reservation lists with date and guest details, listing management for updating property information, analytics for performance tracking, payment history, and settings for availability and notification preferences. The dashboard surfaces the operational information a hospitality business needs at a glance — upcoming bookings, pending reservations, revenue at a quick scan — without requiring deep navigation to find the most time-sensitive data.
ADMIN · VENDOR LIST
This section gives Rhace full oversight over the business that subscribes for their service. This shows all the clients and vendors they have.
ADMIN · RESERVATIONS
This section also allows Rhace see the amount of reservations their client gets on a daily. This is helpful in the case of a percentage-based subscription.
ADMIN · FINANCIAL DASHBOARD
A dedicated financial view shows platform-level revenue broken into four KPI cards, a transaction list with individual payment records, and quick stats. Separating the financial dashboard from the main overview keeps operational data (bookings, vendors) and financial data (revenue, payouts) in distinct contexts, reducing cognitive load for admins who are focused on one dimension at a time.
KEY DESIGN DECISIONS
What shaped the platform
1
One search bar for three verticals — unity over separation
The homepage could have had three separate entry points — a Restaurant section, a Hotel section, a Club section. Instead, a single unified search component routes users to the right vertical based on their tab selection. This was a deliberate product strategy decision: it positions Bookies as one platform, not three services sharing a homepage. The psychological effect on the user is significant — they perceive more value in a single destination that does everything than in a site where they have to choose their product first.
2
Pre-select meals — turning a reservation into an experience
Most restaurant booking platforms stop at the time slot. Bookies extends the booking flow to include meal pre-selection — starter, main course, and dessert — with optional special requests (seating preference, special occasion, allergies). This was the single biggest UX differentiator in the restaurant vertical. For consumers, it reduces the anxiety of a first visit to an unfamiliar restaurant. For vendors, it provides pre-service operational intelligence. For the platform, it deepens engagement and increases the switching cost away from Bookies.
3
Dark teal sidebar — visual role separation by design
The consumer platform uses a light, photography-led visual language. The vendor and admin dashboards use a dark teal sidebar with a white content area. This visual separation is intentional and functional — it signals to a vendor or admin that they are in an operational context, not a browsing context. The brain switches modes. The same teal brand colour anchors both experiences, maintaining brand coherence, while the treatment of it differs enough to communicate the distinction clearly.
4
Promotional badges at browse — social proof before the click
Rating stars, booking counts ("3,000 booked"), discount badges ("20% off"), and editorial labels ("Guest's Recommended", "Most Visited", "Top Deal") all appear on listing cards — before the user has clicked into a single property. This front-loads social proof to the discovery stage, where conversion decisions are actually made. A user who sees "3,000 booked" on a hotel card has already begun to trust it before they've read a single review.
OUTCOME
What was delivered
Three complete product
Consumer booking experience, vendor dashboard, and admin control panel — all designed as one coherent system from a single design foundation.
Three booking verticals
Restaurants, hotels, and clubs — each with distinct listing anatomy, booking flows, and user expectations, all unified under one search experience.
Pre-select meal flow
A unique feature that extends restaurant bookings into full dining experiences — differentiating Bookies from every comparable platform in the market.
Platform trust infrastructure
No-show tracking, vendor status management, and promotional badge systems — the design foundations of a trustworthy, scalable marketplace.
REFLECTION
What designing a three-sided platform taught me
Bookies was the most architecturally complex product I've designed. The challenge wasn't any individual screen, it was maintaining coherence across three completely different user contexts while ensuring every design decision served the whole system, not just one side of it.
The pre-select meal feature is the best example of this systems thinking. It's a consumer-facing feature. But it was designed with the vendor in mind, because it only makes sense to build if restaurants actually benefit operationally from the pre-order data. And it only works at platform level if the admin can track and measure engagement with it. A feature that looks like a nice consumer touch is actually a system that has to work across all three sides simultaneously.
That's what multi-sided platform design really is: every feature exists in three contexts at once. The designer's job is to make it serve all three without the user on any side ever feeling the weight of the other two.
