Automating the Indian
restaurant Industry
Improving an enterprise SaaS through Design Sprints
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Urban Piper provides business automation solutions for restaurants and cloud kitchens. They help them get their businesses online and increase their in-store sales through loyalty programs. The platform is used by brands such as Eat.Fit, Chai Point and Cafe Coffee Day as a Swiss Army Knife for their online ordering and catalogue management.
Challenges
We started the sprint by interviewing key stakeholders on the team about product goals and the challenges they were facing. It turned out that Urban Piper had a power-packed product to help restaurants and cloud kitchens manage their catalogue across 8+ food aggregators, check availability across multiple locations, run marketing programs and analyse data. Unfortunately, companies needed daily assistance from Urban Piper’s support team to actually use the product. And that’s precisely the puzzle we stepped in to solve.
Some key challenges that came up were:
- The audience was not using the product effectively, and they were shooting support requests for every change required.
- Users found the product too confusing and often didn’t even knew about many useful features that already existed.
- They didn’t realise the value, benefit and ROI of a do-it-yourself product.
Aligning on our goals
The team then aligned on opportunities to solve during the sprint and prioritised them:
After a discussion around the challenges, the team deliberated on their 2-year product goal:
We then discussed the user personas and their tasks on the platform to map the challenge. It was a product used by a wide variety of users for different purposes. We identified 5 different personas and their core reasons to use the product.
- Business Manager: Analyzes data to provide valuable insights.
- Operations Manager: Monitors the catalogue and sets up the system initially.
- Catalogue Manager: Manages the catalogue across stores.
- Accounts Team: Tracks reports on financial performance across stores.
- Marketing Team: Manages and analyzes marketing activities.
After mapping the challenge, patterns emerged, which further clarified the direction for the sprint. We learnt that:
- The first exposure to the product was always through a demo. The users needed a guided tour of the application before it could be used.
- There was a lot of focus around navigability of the application, which needed a fix.
- Data visualization, if done correctly, could help make the platform sticky by showing helpful, relevant data to the users clearly and concisely.
- With a deluge of data from all the channels (online orders, aggregators and offline stores), the platform needed to be smart, provide deep insights and recommend the next steps so it wouldn't overwhelm the end user.
Ideating Solutions
At this point, we knew the shortcomings of the platform — navigation with confusing hierarchy, improper metrics for analytics, requiring a demo before it could be used. The next step was to ruminate through these problems and come up with a mass of solutions. The key issue was the information architecture. Once we got that right, the rest of the components would automatically fall in place like Tetris blocks.
With that in mind and our hands on paper, we set out to work on the structure and flesh out essential details.
We had some great ideas, which promised to solve some of the team's key problems. We then used these ideas to create a blueprint for the revised product designs via a storyboard.
A/B testing different solutions via prototypes
Based on the storyboard, two prototypes with different dashboard structures were created to A/B test two completely different approaches to the product.
We tested prototypes with actual customers of Urban Piper who were using the current product. This helped us unlock insights on their responses to both options and make informed decisions.
We felt users might want charts and data visualizations over numbers, but to our surprise, most users preferred seeing fewer charts and more key figures to glance through daily. They also loved the structuring of the data and the visual direction.
Final prototypes
With the insights from user tests, we iterated, created a new product prototype, and tested it again.
Style guide
We also created a style guide for the team to implement the new visual style across the product with ease.
Validating ideas through user feedback
“Catalogue configuration across multiple channels seems to be a breeze and really solves the pain point we were having.”
“I can clearly identify where I need to go for which actions and would have to bother with support much less. Navigation is super clear.”
“Analytics shown on the dashboard is great and something I would like to glance at every day. I especially like the breakup by different channels and the ability to filter them.”
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12 yrs of experience in UX Design and helped clients like Meta, Equifax and Delhivery
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15 years of experience and has data led digital transformations for Unicorn Startups