UX Development Lifecycle: From Start to End
Project Purpose: New design for a food ordering system based on various types of user research; Lifecycle of project definition and requirement gathering to prototype testing
Project Life: Individual Effort
Study aimed to determine:
- the challenges of restaurant patrons
- the impacts of those challenges on their dining experiences
Phase 1 - On and around a university campus
Phase 2 - Differing state than the university
Phase 2 - Differing state than the university
Study Results:
- Main aspect of a restaurant is the role of the server
- Universal accessibility is important
- Interactions between front of the house and back of the house greatly impacts customer’s dining experience
Business Goals of Restaurants:
- Focusing on fast casual to casual dining establishments
- Maintaining high customer satisfaction
- Providing quality food and drink
- Promoting clean and safe dining environment
- Acquiring intended clientele
- Solidifying ideal location
- Determining the type of food offered
Ethnography:
- Field method involving observation of humans in their natural environment
- Observation in natural environment allows extrapolation of people’s actions and tasks attempting completion
Casual dining restaurant customers observed during dining experience:
- Two bakery-café establishments
- Cycling-centric cafe and store
- Café serving regional and international bistro fare
Aspects Under Study:
- How to enter the restaurant
- How a customer is seated
- Process for ordering and receiving the food
- Providing payment for the order
Interviews:
- Conducted with people who have experience in the restaurant industry and restaurant patron
- Participant experience ranged from four years to 22 years
- Casual dining establishments were the focus
- Recorded & Transcribed
- Questions centered on:
- Process of taking orders from customers
- Presenting the order correctly to the customer
- Types of challenges that may occur when interacting with a customer
- How dietary requests are handled
Focus Group:
- Allowed for patrons of restaurants to describe and discuss the restaurant experiences
- Involved four restaurant patrons whose favorite restaurant chains were casual dining restaurants
- Common factor between restaurants is order is taken by restaurant staff (i.e. bartender, server, etc.).
- Most common mistake made by restaurants - an item on original order is not delivered
- Other menu accuracy problems
- Running out of menu items
- Presenting the entirely wrong order
- Giving a customer a menu item that contains an allergen.
- Consistent Preference voiced was presence of a server during the customer’s dining experience
Advantages of Tablets in Restaurants (Forbes, 2012):
- Easy to use
- Paying the bill was fast and convenient
- Ability to check the news and weather was available
- Playing games made the wait time go faster
- Calculator for splitting the check or calculating the tip (Forbes, 2012)
Disadvantages of Tablets in Restaurants (Forbes, 2012):
- Removes human interaction
- Cannot answer specific questions about food or the bill
- Some games must be paid for to play
- Use threatens many jobs for wait staff
Prototype Tested:
- Table-side tablet design at a casual dining restaurant
- Focused on viewing menu with item ingredients, making selection and viewing the order prior to purchase
- Provided the ability for selected ingredients to be removed from the menu item
- Indicated if the removed item is or is not an allergy
- Allowed the customer to view a menu type (i.e. no dairy), add items order and receive confirmation page
