Food Ordering at Workplace — A UX Case Study.
My friends and I eat a lot in our office cafeteria. Standing in queues for a long time to order food is difficult. If we could ease the process and make it online it’d save a lot of time and make the experience smooth. Since I’ve started working from home and had a little time in my hand, I decided to understand the process better and improve the food ordering experience in cafeteria.
The search for the problem statement
Making services digital is a great idea but is it the only solution? For example, no matter how many note-taking apps have come into the market the good old Post-its are still relevant and widely used in our day to day activities both for professional and personal uses. Keeping this in mind, instead of assuming that an app was required, it was important to ask the below questions.
What is the need for a food ordering app in a cafeteria? What problem can it solve? How is it better than ordering conventionally? In what ways will this benefit the customer?
Now it was time to take a survey and find out the answers to these questions and understand the pain points of the customers in their day to day food ordering experience.
Understanding the problem
Research Approach
Since the problem statement has been defined it was time to do root cause analysis.
In order to understand the user journey and pain points of customers (Employees) while ordering food at the cafeteria, I talked to a couple of my colleagues and friends who have been working in various organizations. The idea here is to understand how people from different organizations order food on a daily basis and the resources that they have, to do so.
As I began to talk to a lot of my friends and peers, I understood that I have left out an entire group of people that were quite important to understand the process completely. I realized that the problem had to be tackled in two ways. Understanding what the employee’s journey was, wasn’t nearly enough. I had to understand the vendor side of the process too. Since COVID and the whole WFH scenario, it was difficult to get the contacts of the vendors in my organization. So, I’ve reached out to a few hotel managers and owners who have put a stall in our cafeteria in order to understand restaurant inventory management better.
For employee’s journey mapping, the questions were simple. What was the experience of an employee in a cafeteria on a day to day basis from the time they entered the cafeteria till they received their food? How comfortable was their experience? What are the pain points in the process? How can I increase the scope for a better experience?
When it came to the vendor side, I’ve realized that the main points of concern were the management of the stall, staffing, Inventory management, and tracking, and the huge queues with impatient customers during the rush hour were hectic to deal with.
Defining Customers:
Upon research and talking to a lot of my friends from different organizations, colleagues and extensive search on google has given me enough data, to sum up, their experience into the following two personas.
Defining vendors:
As it was difficult to reach out to the vendors from my organization. I’ve picked the next best thing and talked to a couple of cafe owners and entrepreneurs, some of whom open stalls in our cafeteria once in a while and made the following persona based on their experience of the other side of the food ordering system.
Journey Map
Now that I understood what the goals, pain points of customers, and the vendors were, the next step is to map their journey. Journey Mapping helps us to group different actions performed at a particular stage of food ordering. Now, when we map the stages with actions, we’ll be able to see and understand the challenges faced and look for scope of improvement wherever there is.
Proposed Solution
The traditional food ordering in cafeterias of organizations is time-consuming and hectic for both employees and vendors. My hypothesis is that by making the food ordering system online, we’ll be able to easily navigate through the available menu from different vendors, skip long queues, pay online and also keep a track of all our orders. This will help the employees to have a hassle-free experience in their break time and the vendors will have a better track of orders and their inventory management system.
Goals & Feature Ideation
Customer goals
Journey mapping made it easy to understand the challenges at each stage and identify the scope for improvement. It also helped me understand customer goals and identify the features required.
To make vendor selection easy
- Offers and discounts
- Favorite box
- History of orders
- Pre Order Food
Easy selection of menu
- Live updation of menu
- Nutritional info
Feedback/ Rating options
- Feedback portal
- Vendor ratings
- Food ratings
Hassle-Free Payment
1. Digital Payment
A live order tracking system of the orders
- Order Status updates
- Confirmation of order received
- Cancellation of orders
Vendor goals
Even though this project mainly focuses on the customer’s journey and goals, I have to keep in mind the vendor goals and the features necessary to make the experience seamless. Hence, I have listed down the following goals mapped with the features to achieve the same.
Hassle-free Acceptance/ Tracking order
- Confirmation of order received by the customer
- Update if the vendor is busy
- Preparation time updation
- Tracking orders
Being able to put only available items on the menu
- Special offers
- Menu updation
Be able to do inventory management/order tracking better
- Inventory management analytic tab
- Order tracking of past and current orders
Customer & Vendor Flow
Keeping the goals and the requested features and their feasibility in mind, I’ve laid out a customer and vendor flow showing the different actions to be performed from logging in to accepting/ delivering the order and different features available in order to navigate smoothly among the same.
Wireframe for Customer app
Visual Design
The UI was designed following the laws of UX. All the icons and buttons are placed following Fitt’s law. Every action is clearly mentioned and broken down into smaller tasks for the user to understand and navigate through the app better by keeping in mind Hick’s law. The placement of some of the icons and buttons are done using Jacob’s law. Even though this law doesn’t hold true everywhere, it can be used to design apps that perform a similar task. The elements in the app are grouped and spaced keeping the Law of Common Region, the law of similarity, and the law of proximity in mind. These laws state that similar elements should be distinguished with a clearly defined space and boundary.
Next Steps
A food ordering app at the cafeteria can save a lot of time for the employees and the vendors. A lot of organizations could benefit from this. Not just the corporate sector but also Universities and colleges can use this in their canteens and mess for a hassle-free experience.
You cannot make a good design in one go. A good design is always a work in progress. I’d like to revisit my design whenever I think I can improve any aspect of it. I’d like to make a working prototype and take the user’s feedback whenever possible and iterate on the same if needed. The more I practice designing the better the process gets.
Learnings
When I first started this project, my knowledge of UX was limited. My aim was to understand what new features I wanted and to build an aesthetically pleasing app. At the point where I stand now, I realize that design is much more than what meets the eye. I understood the importance of research, documentation, and networking.
As this was a solo project, I’ve done the Brainstorming, User Research, Journey Mapping, Information Architecture, Feature Ideation, Wireframes, Visual Design, and Documentation.
This was my first UX project. Although it was not an ideal one, owing to the liberty of setting up the constraints as per my comfort, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun along the way.
I’d like to thank my mentor Aprajit for helping me understand the design process better and guiding me whenever required and the RethinkingUX community for providing me an opportunity to learn and grow.
Design is all about looking at usual things with unusual eyes. Learn and practice good design :)
