ZIPLUNCH

What is Private Paths?

ZipLunch primarily provides business
or commercial building renters and
tenants the ability to order lunch and
dinner from local restaurants at takeout
prices with free delivery.

Role

Design lead

Tools

Figma, Adobe illustrator

Duration

4 months

Overview

ZipLunch aims to scale their offerings to condos and apartments and through that, provide a comprehensive 'restaurant
dashboard/portal' where a restaurant owner (user) can sign up and create an account in order to: upload and set up menu items, set
prices, establish schedules, manage deliveries and orders, process payments and adjust account settings.

Currently, ZipLunch is manually placing orders with the restaurants after receiving them from their customers and that is not scalable.It is hard to maintain current processes and an automated solution is needed. By providing the restaurant owners with their own administrative system or portal, bulk orders can be placed and fulfilled with ease and in return, this will could potentially help with new restaurant sign ups and decrease restaurant turnover. The ZipLunch team specified that our work should reflect these user needs:
• Onboarding

• View dashboard
• Create menus
• Scheduling
• Receive orders

Approach

We utilized the Stanford design thinking process for our approach as you'll see below.

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Empathize

Competitive Analysis

For our competitive analysis, we looked at ZipLunch’s main competitors. We wanted to know who the competition was, were we could take advantage of in the market, and features that we could add to our product. I evaluated the following competitors:

Uber Eats
Ritual
Peachd
LuchOn

Exploratory Research

For our exploratory research into the food service industry to have a better understanding of the industry standards, we asked ourselves: ; Why do restaurant owners want a delivery/order system app?

What is the value in business specific online food ordering? What are current admin portal metrics? Is there anything we can learn from them?

We found that:

Food delivery is currently a $93 Billion industry
16% of food is ordered from the workplace, globally
The competition strived to make it simple to order without thinking too much
Increased third party delivery
In-house restaurant delivery fleets
Prioritizing delivery data tracking
Tech giants moving in on food delivery
Rapid online grocery growth
A rise in food delivery subscriptions
Reorder items you have previously ordered.
Google integrates food delivery services into Search, Maps and Assistant

User Interviews

To get more insights from potential users, we set out to interview 11 users provided by ZipLunch. Of the 11 interviewees, we were only able to interview 1. We crafted a contingency plan in the event of no-shows and by sourcing potential users ourselves, we were able to complete 6 user interviews. I wanted to know what restaurant owners needed, what caused them problems, and where they felt there could be improvements. The image shows the affinity diagram we created using Miro resulting from our user interviews.

The following are some of what our interviewees had to say:

“I'm always looking for, you know, new partners and new technologies and new applications to use to obviously, bring more business.”

“The one thing that they could solve, is the delivery aspect of it, instead of putting that delivery aspect of it directly on to the restaurant. I think they will have a better relationship between the restaurant and them.”

"Another thing that's very important is for us to manage our own inventory and our own menu."

Define

Design principles

The following are the design principles that governed the creation of our product.

Organized:

Access to all data in one place

Reliable:

Change is good, but consistency is key

Simple:

Prioritize ease of use in platform

Convenient:

Increase time efficency

User Persona

Meet John, he embodies the goals, motivations, behaviors and frustrations we gathered from our user interviews. He is a 30 year old restaurant owner living in Toronto, Ontario. He is very organized and technology savvy and always looks for new ways to expand his business and customer base. He hopes to take advantage of technology to do just that.

Problem statement

From our research, we created the following problem statement

"The restaurant owner wants a clean, simple, and portable administrative tool with a supportive on-boarding process that allows them to manage their menu, schedule and order process so that they are better able to reach a larger market, efficiently meet customer needs, and maintain productivity"

Ideate

Initial Sketches

We individually created divergent 6-8-5 sketches. As a result of the time constraint, we decided to not only create divergent concepts, but do our best to focus them mainly on our individually allotted sections. I was in charge of the order process and so created sketches showcasing the home page and the order pages.

Home

Low fidelity wire frames

I gave life to my ideas by creating low fidelity wireframes using Figma. I had thought to spread out the information on the dashboard according to specific dishes, however, after deliberating with my team and the ZipLunch team, we found it best to summarize it all on one page as will be seen in the mid-fidelity wireframes.

Home

Site Map

As we converged our designs, we created a site/app map that showed the structure, content and functions of the restaurant portal. During the process, we figured out the different aspects of the features we would be keeping, expanding on, or deleting. As stated earlier, the ZipLunch team specified that we work on the dashboard, menu, schedule, and order processes so those were the focus of our site map.

Screen Shot 2020-07-23 at 1.24.55 PM.png

Mid-fidelity Wireframes and Prototype

At this stage, we had presented our ideas to the ZipLunch team and finalized all the features of the product. There were some ideas that did not make it to mid-fidelity wireframes, for example, the gps feature. The ZipLunch team explained that at this stage, they would not be able to roll out a gps feature, deciding it would be a feature they were thinking of implementing in the future. Still, the team ended up going with my designs as the framework for the portal. We used these wireframes to create a prototype for usability testing. The following screens used to breakdown this app have been modified by me to better fit my vision for the product.

Onboarding & Dashboard

Onboarding: here, users begin their journey with ZipLunch. They are asked for their restaurant information as well as personal login information. They are also asked to upload their Menus and select their days and times of operation as well as cut off times for taking orders. Finally, once signed in, they will go through a live tutorial of the administrative portal.
Dashboard: the dashboard will present the restaurants data in an organized and easy to understand fashion. Restaurants can view their upcoming orders, income for the week, trajectory of sales, and top selling meals.

Here, users can upload, edit, and delete menus or menu items. They have the option of manually inputting menu items or uploading a pdf of their menu.

Schedule

Here, users can set their restaurant hours. Here they can input or change the days and times they’re open. They can also add holidays & special events days they observe every year and their hours for those days. Restaurants also have a menu schedule where they can change the days and times menu items are available. The schedule section also contains a calendar for easy viewing.

Order

Here, restaurants are able to view and update their order process. They can confirm, delay, and cancel orders. They can also search for an order using the order number.

Click to View Prototype

Testing

From July 25, 2020 through July 28, 2020, our UX team conducted usability tests of the ZipLunch admin portal prototype. We conducted a total of 9 user interviews, 4 of which were currently in the food industry. All test takers, however, had at some point worked in the food industry. This was as a result of no-shows from interviewees provided by ZipLunch. We received the following feedback from our testing:

9

Participants

87.5%

Onboarding process approval rating

75%

Order process approval rating

85%

General flow approval rating

82%

Menu process approval rating

The ordering section received an approval rating of 75%. This was where we met some issues. What ZipLunch wanted wasn’t really meshing well with what users expected concerning the Order/delivery process. Users wanted less clicks and more automation especially when it came to the delivery. They expected ZipLunch to be in charge of updating the delivery status while ZipLunch expected the restaurants to bear the burden. In the end, the ZipLunch team was satisfied with the ordering process I came up with, while the users were not. I was able to straighten it out in our final meetup where I explained to the client that what they were trying to achieve did not align with the users need.

Recommendations

We recommended the following to ZipLunch as they move ahead with the redesign:

Make top navigation more clear.
Add a help/live chat - customer support icon like the one on the customer-facing end.
Reconsider Menu Schedule placement. Does it live in the Menu tab, Schedule tab or both?
Add a spot on the dashboard, mark the calendar on the restaurant schedules and send a notification when your restaurant is being featured on ZipLunch.

Specifically for the order process, I recommended the following:

Send a message go to customers once the order leaves the restaurant. After 30 minutes, ask the customers if they received their meal. The order changes to delivered once the customer states that they have received it.
Using a driver app, the restaurant driver can select that the food has been delivered or the driver can contact the restaurant to change the status to delivered. After this, the customers receives a confirmation saying the food is delivered.
Using a driver app with a GPS feature, when the driver is within 50 feet of the hub, the GPS prompts for a confirmation to be sent to the customer confirming delivery. This will also update the delivery status in the ZipLunch portal.