Date: June 2021-October 2021
Client: Solo Project
Role: UI/UX Designer
The challenge
Delays in Restaurants
The initial problem discovery I’ve noticed is that business people don’t like to wait for their orders in the restaurant. Because when they go to a restaurant, waiters welcome them, give the menus, take the orders and bring the food out, this system might be glitchy sometimes because of many reasons (crowded, waiters or waitresses might be distracted and might not notice new arrivals, or sometimes it is hard to pick meals from the menu because some menus are not detailed or legible). So more specifically the problem was:
It may take a long time to order in a restaurant if you are in a hurry. So I aimed to reduce ordering time in this project.
User Research
Thanks to my white paper research I stumbled upon a study. It reveals 3.9 % of leisure customers think waiting time is an important element for them to make repeat-purchase decisions, but among business customers, there are 8.5 % consider waiting time is an important factor for them to make repeat-purchase decisions. I can say that this study supports my hypothesis about busy workers who don’t like to wait for their orders in a restaurant. I can say this study supports my hypothesis about busy workers who don’t like to wait for their orders in a restaurant.
I also did a competitive analysis between 4 brands and I examined four popular apps in terms of the number of delivery options, order customization, reviewing, and menu content quality to see what was working or what could be improved and how I can reflect that within my own design.
Overall the gap that I see is there is no review for each meal item. I think it is one of the important things to reduce deciding time what to eat in a restaurant. Because, according to social proof from Persuasion Principles, we look to others to guide our behavior. Apart from this, some apps have multiple delivery options and informative menus with good quality photos like burger king, some users have trouble canceling their reservation or order like in OpenTable, according to their reviews on Appstore.
Although I saw that reducing order time is important from my competitive analysis and white paper research, I did interviews with my users about placing an order process at a restaurant or from the app.
So there were 5 business people across a variety of majors like engineering, education, and medicine. I asked them the questions below to find some trends in placing an order. I asked some questions like, "Tell me your process for placing an order in a restaurant." "What was the most difficult part about placing an order?", and with these insights, I organized all my data and eventually I formed 4 pain points.
“I wish I could order from my phone before I come to the restaurant and have my meal without waiting in line.’’
Requirements
Considering, the most valuable points from my user interviews and data sheets I ended up with these points to solve.
Based on these user needs I narrowed down my insights into 3 categories that I wanted to address
An organized, detailed menu where users can quickly find exactly what they need
A meal app that users can order before coming to a restaurant and track their order preparation time.
A meal app that has all features that users want to see (reviews, order options, professional photos, etc.) and enables users to order efficiently
from there, I created my personas, and user journey, and eventually developed my final product, SteakMe.
Personas
User Journey Naisha
When mapping out the journey of this busy user her process for placing an order in a restaurant went like this. The user first hit the road because she is hungry, she is excited to have a good meal but eventually, that internal motivation does seem to wane and she feels even more hungry because of waiting too much. And usually, it’s at the fifth point she wants to leave the restaurant. Because, after deciding what to eat, she has to wait for the waiter a second time to convey her order.
So now I had a better understanding of my user persona. Business people don’t like to cook at home all the time, they prefer to be ordering process quick as much as possible but sometimes they struggle to pick a meal from a useless menu, or sometimes the waiter makes them wait for too much or they have to wait in the line to place an order in a restaurant.
Ideation
So these became my questions for SteakMe designs.
How might we make business people feel less anxious about their placing an order in the restaurant? Now I’m moving forward to design
Wireframe & Prototype
Just to give you an idea here how I tried to sketch, then determine the flows for this app design. I asked myself what is the main point of this app, what is the easiest way to get the user there. The overall goal is, you decide on a meal then you choose order options (I.e delivery, pickup, join a waitlist, meet outside), and then it would also make sense to modify your order and also to be able to cancel it.
To achieve my main goal and to be a faster ordering process, I determined some elements to be on the home screen. These are Start order CTA, Recommended meal category, Reviews for every meal, Reorder List, and Add to Cart button from the homepage.
Usability Tests
I conducted 2 rounds of usability studies. And upon constant testing of my first design, I continually iterated this design with some major and minor improvements based on 5 business people's feedback. The second usability testing was mainly about user flow, checkout, and reorder process problems..
High Fidelity Mockups
And then upon all these iterations and feedback my final design had reviews for every meal and multiple order options and view their reservation status after ordering. As I mentioned before within my whitepaper research business people are 2x more likely to care about waiting time to repurchase something. So In my opinion for any circumstances, users can have multiple delivery options including join a waitlist. Thanks to this feature, many users can order their meals from the app before coming to the restaurant, and according to the estimated time, they can arrange their arrival time and can eat hot meals without waiting in the restaurant.
For detailed information about the whole process, please check my presentation.
