Fallon & Byrne Website

Fallon & Byrne is an Irish food company with many outlets; food halls, restaurants, cafes, a wine cellar, an events ballroom, and a catering service. Based across multiple locations, they have established themselves as one of Dublin's premium food experiences.

A new website

As a long-standing client of Javelin Direct's marketing services, it made sense that Fallon & Byrne approached Javelin Digital for a quite badly needed website refresh. Their existing website had been built more than ten years previous, and was very much out of date. It wasn't communicating the multiple areas of the business to its customers, and the functionality across different screen sizes was extremely poor.

Planning and strategy

As Senior Designer in Javelin Digital, I led both the UX and the UI areas of the project, working alongside the Fallon & Byrne marketing department to wireframe out a completely new structure for the website. They needed to be able to display all the different services they offered simultaneously, but without overwheleming their users.

Key services were defined and kept on permanent display within the main navigation, and user-friendly contact forms were scattered throughout the website, actively inviting customers to make enquiries or request pricing. A drop-down Category menu was included in this form, presenting customers with a full list of services offered, and making the lesser-known services more discoverable in the process.

Imagery-led design

With every right to be proud of their foodie reputation, Fallon & Byrne knew from day one that they wanted their vast libraries of sumptuous food photography to be a big part of the new website. The final visual design uses bold fullscreen photography throughout, with a minimal UI, to better represent a truly food-obsessed brand.

Taking pressure off Fallon & Byrne staff

While speaking to employees in the different Fallon & Byrne locations, we identified that customer telephone enquiries about booking tables, opening hours, and food delivery were taking up a huge amount of time. Agreeing that this time could be far better spent by the highly specialised staff in their areas of culinary expertise, we designed three sticky calls-to-action that are always visible to a user throughout the website.

By clicking on 'Book', 'Hours' or 'To Go', a user is presented with a pop-up modal, easily dismissed again if not needed. Each of these modals contains the required information to help reduce the number of repetitive telephone calls the staff were receiving, and in the case of 'Book', we integrated the Open Table online reservation service into the website, allowing customers to complete their bookings online from start to finish.

Making all services visible

After launch, we were pleased to hear Fallon & Byrne report an increase in enquiries into the lesser known areas of their business, such as office catering or their events ballroom. Many of these new enquiries referenced the website as the place where they had discovered the full range of services offered, despite having been Fallon & Byrne food hall or cafe regulars for years.