BentoBox Sales Portal
Role: UX Designer
Duration: 1 month | Summer 2020
Team: Katherine Lough, UX Designer
Disclaimer: This is a spec project. Neither my partner no I have any affiliation with BentoBox
Among the many challenges the COVID-19 crisis has brought, the lively and renowned restaurant culture of New York City faced a stark reality of shuttering all in person business on March 15th, 2020. While The City and its people have endured as they always have, businesses had to rapidly adapt to stay afloat or make the brutal choice of closing down all together.
Pre-COVID, restaurants were facing rising overhead costs of offering online ordering and delivery. Seamless/GrubHub offered the convenience of the internet to process online orders for customers, but this product didn’t come without a cost to the restaurant. Seamless, and others ordering platforms charge 15-30% commission fee per order. They have also come under fire for shadier business tactics that leave restaurants with even less than the average 3-5% profit margin.
Businesses are fighting to survive on two fronts: changing their product output to be purely takeout and delivery orders, and sacrificing profits to be featured on the most prevalent and popular ordering sites.
How can we help New York City restaurants stay afloat during the COVID crisis while supporting online ordering customers have come to rely on and enjoy?
partnership
Through the lens of the COVID crisis in NYC, we wanted to build upon a platform that services restaurants with ethical business practices. Our teams’ personal experience in that food industry helped up navigate the current options for restaurant sales, websites and online ordering. We decided BentoBox would be an ideal partner.
How can we help BentoBox?
Their business offers custom webpages for restaurants to share their own ambiance and personality. They offer online ordering portals, and additional sales options for events and gift certificates and most of all their business model features a monthly subscription cost versus a per order commission cost. Our addition of a POS system to their suite of tools would round out their services and be a complete package for business owners .
research
Our goals of research were to better understand the landscape of a restaurant, its employees, and the challenges of current or legacy POS systems.
We conducted long form interviews focusing on the cycle of incoming orders, how those are processed in house, the channels of communication between customers, restaurants, and kitchen staff, and the challenges therein. We also asked targeted question on their experiences working during COVID as well as being consumers.
These interviews were synthesized by the team to hone in on solving the immediate problems
Our affinity map manifested groups of interesting information:
Restaurant employees need a system that reflects the way people order food with custom fields and easy editing.
Restaurant employees find it difficult and time consuming to duplicate orders from a third party provided (and mandatory) POS system to the in house POS system.
Restaurant employees utilize a combination of shorthand, POS system and verbal communication to complete their jobs and keep customers and kitchen staff up to date.
Up to the minute communication with customers is not only expected but helpful in setting expectations and avoiding complaints or disappointment from customers.
With the COVID crisis still effecting the restaurant industry and terms of service in flux, it is necessary to have an agile operational system to adapt.
We were left confident that our product would have a solid use case, and that the following features would be included to serve our target user:
Order tickets with list and gallery view
Easy progression to mark active tickets
Saved customer information with specialized markers for requests/allergies etc
Frequently used language to reflect the job
Progression bar for tracking visible to restaurant and customer
design
With insights from our long form interviews, and features identified we created a persona for reference throughout the project. Stacy is out archetype and is the person we would be designing for. We documented her and an average work day to refer to and target the dips in her emotional state with the features of our application.
Stacy the Server - Persona
Stacy the Server - Journey Map
NOTE: Adapting to the COVID restrictions in New York city has been a learning curve. Doing UX work with a team is a hurdle, but my partner in this project Katherine Lough, and I were able to bridge the physical divide and work together via Zoom and Slack. Below is a shot from our design studio workshop for this BentoBox extension.
Above you will see high fidelity screens for task number 2. In these screens we included the features highlight from our research stage: A gallery view of tickets, highlighted customer information and special requests, a status filing system for tickets in various states of readiness, and a progress bar on each ticket for customer communication.
testing
To test our product we asked 4 participants to complete 5 tasks within the app:
Type a pin code to enter the app
Check on the new order and send it to the kitchen
Remove a specified item from an order
Mark this order as ready
Use this app to check on todays sales
We conducted these tests in both mid and high fidelity with user influenced changes in between. We found that taxonomy was a great guide for users, and while we expected restaurant jargon to be useful, it was a challenge to use it in a digital format. We were able to highlight editing features and redirect users to a single button to process and update order status’
Key Results:
We were able to improve from round 1 of testing to round 2 in several areas:
We maintained or increased direct success across all 5 tasks.
In 3 of 5 tasks we were able to decrease the average time it took to complete.
In 4 of 5 tasks we maintained or improved the easiness rating.
We need to continue to clarify our language of buttons and interactions as servers move tickets through the stages of readiness.
next steps
The COVID crisis continues into today, September 2020. With no end in sight, and business closures of all kinds, New York City restaurants are at a crossroads: do we invest in adapting to the new normal?
It’s with great hope that we built this application. We believe it supports not only the times that call for exclusive online ordering, but also the work flow of essential workers like restaurant staff.
Some next steps for this team is to continue to work on labeling and language to improve ease through the application, and to expand on analytics for business to have more control over ordering, inventory and profits.