Product designer
June 2020 - Aug 2020
1 designer
1 Biz Ops Lead, Alexis
Experience design
Design Research
Project Management
Visual Design
UI/UX Design
Prototyping & Testing
I was tasked to create an order fulfillment system that would help increase order success rate and improve QA by visualizing recipes and training material on a physical display and building upon employee onboarding. I worked alongside Alexis, who was the biz ops lead accountable for the project.
VKC partners with over 15 restaurants offering over 60 menu items to create “Food Hall” on Uber Eats, Doordash, and Caviar. Food Hall is like any other restaurant on food delivery apps except you can order a Mac and Cheese from Homeroom AND a Poki Bowl from Poki Time all in the same order! Unfortunately, this means that order fulfillment can get messy, especially since there are so many recipes and restaurants to keep track of. Customers were complaining that their orders were often missing sides and add ons and the presentation of the meals were not consistent. Our goals for this project were to create a serviceable dashboard that would accomplish the following:
To stay within budget and scope we implemented a lean UX approach. In the initial round, I conducted preliminary research on the onboarding material and organized the requirements into a set of concept prototypes for user testing. In the second round, we took the insights and feedback and iterated upon a final prototype.
With this and the aforementioned goals in mind, I sought to understand the following research questions:
VKC’s onboarding material was fairly simple. For each restaurant there is a slide deck that introduces the restaurant, the dishes and sides available, and specific instructions on how to prepare each dish. Accompanying the deck is a video that walks employees through how each dish is made step-by-step. Since all of the dishes are pre-made, all meals are prepared via a large steamer oven or a turbochef (an industrial convection oven). Since there is already a plethora of information available to the kitchen staff, my task was to figure out how to simplify and display the information in the kitchen for both experienced and new staff members.
VKC's onboarding material
The major steps of preparing any given dish at VKC can be broken down into 4 steps: Item Gathering, Preparation, Assembly and Bagging. For this project, we decided to focus on Preparation and Assembly. After studying the onboarding material, I came up with a set of initial concepts for a dashboard to be used as that considered all aspects of food preparation such as:
the onboarding materials were the building blocks of our prototypes
Our many explorations!
Interview Participants
Maria, staff trainer, employed 1/2 year
Adaly, kitchen staff, employed ~1 year
Michelle, staff trainee, employed 2 months
We crafted a user persona from the insights gathered in the interviews. While we considered both new trainees and experienced kitchen staff in the design process, we decided to optimize for the experienced employee for 3 reasons:
To help kitchen staff get in the mindset of instructing, I asked participants to pretend as though they were training me, a new staff member, through the making of an order. In the process of teaching me how to make a recipe in real-time, interviewees were able to highlight which steps were most important, include crucial details that might not have been on the training guides, and provide guiding best practices along the way.
One of the biggest unknowns that we discussed was how much information to display. Below are the 3 prototypes that showed varying levels of detail and media type along with the overall feedback collected.
Cherry-picked action items included 1-2 gifs or short clips that displayed the most important steps for a dish
Ingredient-based key steps outlined all major steps in the process of preparing a given dish
Key steps included 4-5 images that outlined the most important steps for a dish
testing media type
We analyzed and distilled the results from our interviews into 5 key actionable insights. With a better understanding of the training process and how kitchen staff operate in the kitchen, we utilized the insights to ideate and refine upon the final prototype.
Using the "Key Steps" prototype as a skeleton, Alexis and I put together a feature roadmap that helped us prioritize all the features necessary for a V1.
I sketched out a number of concepts through low-fidelity wireframes and exploring a variety of different ticketing interfaces. I validated my designs with a group of designers from my network and the consensus was a version with a side menu that delineated the incoming tickets from the recipe instructions itself. This allows for easy ticket navigation and encourages users to complete tickets in order from most urgent to least. Order completion CTAs are found on the side menus in consideration of rush hour when kitchen staff are sequencing and multiple tickets may need to be ticked off at once.
I presented the final prototype to Alexis and the ops team at VKC for a final handoff. The prototype was a simple but clear interface that allowed for easy navigation through tickets and recipes.