We first met Sides about two years in the past by our mutual buddies. They stated they’d been round since 2004 with their product, supporting eating places of their core enterprise processes. After which, we discovered that whereas the technical aspect had been actively evolving, they hadn’t made many modifications within the product design since its first variations.
Not solely roots from the digital stone age did make this sound difficult — however the precise useful complexity did much more. Sides is greater than a product — it’s a spread of merchandise mixed to serve a particular viewers.
Think about the product complexity, contemplating they take care of all the next for the restaurant companies:
- attracting and retaining clients (bonus system and web site);
- receiving and processing orders (internet store, POS system, name middle, self-order terminal, and supply portals);
- managing preparation and supply (driver app and kitchen supervisor);
- enterprise administration (HR administration, merchandise administration, department administration, and statistics).
Though the vary of options sounded spectacular to us, we understood that it was not sufficient anymore for the product to have a posh operate to achieve success. Essentially the most aggressive ones already had a superb person expertise. And that’s what Sides additionally realized proper earlier than turning to us.
Problem
As we discovered afterward, Sides wished to deal with the onboarding half within the first place. New customers needed to spend round two working days to determine work with the platform. Not solely did the method take too lengthy — however it was typically unclear. We imagined there was room for unpleasantness on the customers’ aspect throughout the onboarding stage. The product workforce agreed to that and stated that it led to a few penalties for his or her enterprise.
To begin with, a number of the clients would naturally bounce off throughout this stage because of the size of the onboarding stage and its unclarity. Secondly, the shopper help workforce was at all times overwhelmed with the how-to sort of questions from newcomers. Sides wished to make a greater expertise for his or her customers, a step instantly related to their enterprise success.
Course of
We shook palms and began researching the platform simply as common customers would do. That’s part of our traditional course of: we attempt to step into customers’ sneakers so the testing can be an trustworthy experiment. Nonetheless, we ended up confused. And shocked. We’d seen and constructed fairly just a few merchandise, however nonetheless, there have been components we couldn’t determine on our personal.
Though the Sides workforce supplied explanations, we felt overwhelmed with the performance and confused concerning the total impression of the product. So, we stored researching, turning to the product workforce quite typically.
We additionally talked concerning the buyer situations, core performance, and limitations. We discovered concerning the product workforce’s perspective on what needed to be improved and the data that supported their imaginative and prescient. Particularly, we obtained metrics knowledge, which we used to investigate the platform’s usability additional.
Subsequent, we studied the approaches amongst rivals, added greatest practices of complicated SaaS merchandise from different domains, and mixed all the data we had gotten to this point. Altogether, it helped us to listing the preliminary hypotheses of product options. Primarily based on our hypotheses, we moved on to prototyping the brand new person stream for buyer onboarding and carried out an preliminary sequence of workshops with the product workforce.
Within the course of, we found different ache factors down the shopper journey that weren’t mirrored with sufficient readability within the UI/UX design of the product. On the identical time, there have been those that had been utilizing Sides for some time and gotten accustomed to the product the way in which it was. Subsequently, the brand new design had not solely to resolve issues however do it in a form of acquainted method.
After the analysis section and our preliminary prototyping, we ended up with an inventory of the challenges all through the product — these we had been going to deal with with the design. Primarily based on the listing, we prototyped, examined, and refined new components, sections, and person flows, one after the other addressing every level of the listing. It was a hybrid type of collaboration, which consisted of an enormous piece of our autonomous work and an important a part of our collaboration with Sides (doing workshops and numerous workforce classes).
To summarize our work, we got here up with the next highlights:
1. Simplified the onboarding half and ensured ease and readability at each step.
2. Made the dish creation extra intuitive and supplied explanations on the factors the place clients may very well be confused.
3. Structured the dashboard half to make the workforce studying quick and the administration course of easy.
4. Improved the search and navigation by the platform so clients might simply discover something they wanted.
We labored collectively for round two years, redesigning, adapting, and creating new stuff that may match the entire ecosystem. Because the modifications have been carried out, the product workforce has been sharing with us that their metrics have been regularly bettering.
