Waiting has never been so Smart…
“Every day Alexander goes to his favorite restaurant for lunch, but the restaurant is so well known that he always has to queue and it drives him crazy! Then one day, the restaurant manager was angry because the neighborhood complained about the noise on the street because of the queue. For this reason, the restaurant decided to use a new application to manage a virtual queue, called SmartQ. Since then Alexander has downloaded the app and has never waited in a queue to enter his favorite restaurant and the manager has no new problems with the neighborhood.”
The average amount of time that we spend in queues every year is 18 hours. On average, people spend 52 days of their lives waiting in queues. // Source Telegraph News
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Thanks to SmartQ, customers don’t need to queue to enter a restaurant or bar. By using the application, they are in a virtual queue and can take advantage of their waiting time to do activities around their meeting point.
But why people are queuing ?
What are the motivations of the people who queue to enter a place ? We observed and interviewed typical profiles. We know there are different places where people line up:
— Administrative offices
— Banks
— The stores
— Hairdresser
— Bars
— Restaurants
In order to optimize the efficiency of our application; we decided to focus on features allowing people to be in a virtual queue when they want to enter a friendly place such as restaurants / bars.
Queuing ? Not as good as we think !
Having people lining up is not just a benefit for restaurants. If this is good for the turnover, it also causes them problems with the neighborhood which complains about the crowd and the lack of space to circulate on the sidewalk. Added to this, the staff is stressed and neglects the service that’s why customers leave bad comments on the internet.
In order to better understand what are the objectives and expectations of people who wait hours to enter a restaurant, we have established a methodology in 6 steps :
Shadowing : First, we have observed people in the queue in Sorbillo, one of the famoust place in Naples, to define what kind of people is ready to queue and what are their behavour.
Video Interview : We choose to make video interviews to collect spontaneous testimonials and to learn more about the needs of our users.
TripAdvisor : Based on some places mentionned by people we interwiewed, we analyse the bad comments on trip advisor, written by customers who haven’t appreciated to queue to enter a famous restaurant/bar.
Shadowing, video interviews and analysis of comments on TripAdvisor allowed us to categorize the objectives, expectations and fears of people who are ready to queue for several hours to enter a restaurant.
Persona
Thanks to these elements we were able to identify 3 different typical profiles in the form of “persona” which allowed us to define the main features of our application:
Define the features
To manage the queue, the manager of the restaurant must be ready to send the notification when the last customer is at the end of the meal. The person who is then in the virtual queue receives a notification to go to the restaurant.
For the 1st version of the application, we have defined the following features. They will of course evolve with the users feedbacks that we will have thereafter :
— Announce the expected number of people
— Know the waiting time
— Know if there are places of substitution
— Find places to visit while waiting
— Know your place in the queue
Thanks for your feedbacks.
