Celebrate
Customer experience redesign to attract younger customers, featuring a new reservation flow and experience to commemorate life's special moments
Timeline
August - December 2025
Project Overview
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B2C service design
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repurposing restaurant's assets to attract customers
Role
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Service & Product Designer
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Product Manager
Responsibilities
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Service & Experience Design
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Product Design
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Research & Strategy
Context
Con Alma is a well-known Pittsburgh jazz bar with a strong identity: live jazz music, a high-end atmosphere, and a loyal audience that values both. However, that same identity also creates limits.
Con Alma's customer base is relatively narrow. Many guests come specifically for jazz, while others are comfortable paying for a more expensive night out. In a tighter economy, that made it harder to attract a broader audience—those who are not particular about jazz and are more selective about spending.
I led the client-facing service design of Celebrate featuring a new reservation interface and as well as physical keepsake cards paired with Polaroid photos for customers to remember their special moments.
By focusing on celebrations, we give younger customers a clear and targeted motivation to spend beyond their typical day-to-day budget on a day worth capturing in photo and social media.
Outcomes
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Conducted research and strategized to identify opportunities that would reach beyond Con Alma’s usual audience
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Created a new service for guests to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and proposals through personalized reservations and physical keepsakes
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Reduced implementation costs by using existing restaurant assets such as Polaroid cameras, printing setups, and staff processes
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Earned stakeholder buy-in for a concept the client felt was realistic enough to pursue
User Research
Finding Opportunity On-site
Con Alma is a well-known Pittsburgh jazz bar and restaurant with live music nearly every night. Its strong identity is part of its appeal, but it also narrows the audience.
Many guests come specifically for jazz, while others are comfortable paying for a higher-end meal. In a tighter economy, that made it harder to attract people less motivated by the music or more selective about spending.
Our challenge was to demonstrate Con Alma's appeal to a wider audience without compromising what made it special.
Photos taken from TripAdvisor and Instagram conalmapgh @downtown_design
Before choosing a direction, we spent time in Con Alma observing how the business operated at both high and low demand across its hours. We conducted on-site research, informally talked to guests, gathered feedback from staff, and interviewed our clients, the business owners of Con Alma.
Our research made one thing clear: any idea had to fit Con Alma’s existing operations. Our stakeholders wanted to:
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Preserve Con Alma’s image: they did not want a solution that felt cheap, gimmicky, or difficult for staff to carry out, and
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Have big impact with little investment: The business did not have the budget or appetite for something heavy or complicated.
Across our fieldwork at Con Alma, two types of guests stood out in particular.
The Birthday Girls
On several visits, we noticed groups of younger guests celebrating a special occasion. They were dressed up, took lots of photos with the musicians, and talked about how nice it felt to splurge every once in a while.
The Older Couple
We also talked to a retired couple that now spend their time traveling around the U.S. together. They met because of jazz, stumbled into Con Alma that night, and mentioned how lovely it would be to celebrate their upcoming anniversary.
Apart from Con Alma’s regulars, and the guests who were already likely to come for the music, these two groups felt like the clearest opportunity for broadening the customer base, not only because of how representative they were, but also because of the universal ask: a desire to feel special.
Photos taken from TripAdvisor and Instagram conalmapgh @downtown_design
Ideation
The Need to Feel Special
That insight shaped our first concept.
Our competitive analysis showed that high-end restaurants often make special occasions feel more memorable through small, intentional gestures. Further research and stakeholder conversations showed that Con Alma already did this in limited ways, such as putting out flowers for proposals.
Screenshot taken from TripAdvisor
But those gestures were informal rather than built into the broader guest experience, and was especially unlikely for walk-in guests. Further communication with our clients made it clear that standard complimentary items, such as Cheesecake Factory's free birthday sundaes, would not fit within their budget.
This led us to a more specific question: how could Con Alma celebrate important moments in a way that felt intimate yet sophisticated? And more importantly, what is something only Con Alma could provide?
The most obvious answer was the live music.
Unlike most restaurants, Con Alma offers live jazz nearly every night. It felt like the one part of the experience competitors could not easily replicate, so we saw it as the strongest opportunity to make birthdays, anniversaries, and proposals feel distinctive.
Prototyping & Iteration
Testing the First Concept
For our first stakeholder presentation, we proposed Celebrate, a reservation flow that would let guests note special occasions in advance and request a song as part of the experience.
To keep the concept grounded in Con Alma’s current workflow, we prototyped the experience in Figma using Tock’s existing interface. We also researched whether Tock could realistically support the added feature.
For custom song requests, we grayed out the next seven days in the calendar to signal that those requests required advance notice.
Image of Figma prototype
The idea made sense on paper. It connected special occasions to Con Alma’s most distinctive asset and gave guests a reason to plan celebrations there.
In practice, stakeholders rejected the music component.
Learning & Iterating From Stakeholder Pushback
In our initial concept pitch, our stakeholders pushed back strongly against the music component. The biggest piece of feedback was that the musicians would "feel like circus monkeys" if they were interrupted in the middle of their Bob Dylan set to sing happy birthday, for example.
There were also practical issues around timing, coordination, and logistics with the host that made this idea impractical. However, the business owners loved the redesigned reservation system and agreed with our core value of elevating special moments.
That feedback changed the direction of the project. Rather than holding on to the original concept, I pushed our team to step back and identify what part of our idea was actually worth preserving: the desire to feel recognized.
Examples of market research from the internet, edited for anonymity
We returned to market research and looked more closely at how other high-end restaurants handled birthdays, anniversaries, and proposals.
One pattern kept appearing. The guests who chose to post about their experiences at high-end restaurants often included photos of small physical gestures, such as personalized cards, printed keepsakes, or photos taken on their special day.
What made this idea especially promising was that Con Alma already had the tools to support it. They already owned Polaroid cameras. They already printed menus and other materials. That meant we could create something that felt personal without introducing a new piece of technology, major staff training, or significant cost.
Service Design
Designing a High-Impact Service with Low-Lift
Our final concept kept the reservation flow, but replaced the musical request with a physical keepsake.
Guests could note a birthday, anniversary, proposal, or other milestone when making a reservation. Staff would then have the option to mark the occasion with a printed card and a Polaroid photo.
The strength of our idea was not complexity, it was fit. It gave guests something tangible to remember the evening by, while using tools and workflows Con Alma already had.
Reservation System
Video of Figma prototype
The reservation flow gave guests a simple way to tell Con Alma why they were visiting before they arrived.
Because the concept was validated around Tock’s existing interfaces, it could fit naturally into the restaurant’s current booking experience rather than requiring an entirely new platform.
The Keepsake
Photos of cards designed in Figma
I designed the cards that would turn the moment into something guests could take home. My first versions used a darker palette tied closely to Con Alma’s existing brand, taking inspiration from their website and menu.
However, after feedback about printing cost and production effort, I created simpler black-and-white versions that could be reproduced more easily while still matching Con Alma's identity.
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Photos of cards designed in Figma
The Polaroid could then be paired with the card, giving guests a physical memory of the night easily collected into an annual tradition, or posted on social media for free word-of-mouth advertising.
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Photos of cards designed in Figma; visual prototype not meant to be printed as is
The Polaroid could then be paired with the card, giving guests a physical memory of the night easily collected into an annual tradition, or posted on social media for free word-of-mouth advertising.
Results & Takeaways
Designing with Constraints
As team lead, I was responsible for keeping the project grounded in what Con Alma could actually support. That meant managing the timeline and team workload, leading research and stakeholder conversations, and redirecting the project when our original concept proved unrealistic.
Because of its strong identity, designing for Con Alma with many constraints. The solution could not feel cheap, interfere with the musicians, require expensive new systems, or add too much complexity for staff. Each round of feedback pushed us closer to a concept that worked within those limits rather than against them.
That's why our final proposal built on tools and workflows Con Alma already had. By the end, we had moved from an idea the client would not implement to one that felt on-brand, realistic to execute, and compelling enough for our clients to implement.