Feature Research for “Back Of House” website
Informing a design and development roadmap
Context
During COVID-19, Relish Works, Gordon Food Service’s innovation arm, wants to help restaurant operators navigate a complex and ever-changing digital solutions ecosystem. This ecosystem includes technologies for their POS system, CRM, marketing, inventory, operations, payments, reservations, staffing and more!
BackOfHouse.io, or “Back of House”, will be a platform that helps them quickly find, filter and connect with technology solutions.
The platform is in beta with 156 vendor pages, and continuously growing. It launches to restaurant operators soon.
Objective of the Research
Test the Back of House beta website with restaurant owners and operators to discover usability issues and identity new feature opportunities. We want to inform a cohesive product system, a memorable brand, and new ways to add value for the restaurant industry.
Methodology Overview
• Evaluative Research: 30-minute remote interviews with 8 operators testing the website.
• Prioritization Research: 30-minute remote interviews with 8 operators to test desirability.
• 2 workshops with our internal teams and leadership to refine viability and feasibility.
Professional win:
Championing human-centered research for a digital platform. Before, decisions relied highly on the code development agenda. Now, there’s a path to involve design research. This research is meant to evaluate, define and prioritize features, components, and UI elements.
How Backofhouse.io looked in 2020
Project in Detail
Planning and Scoping
My colleague Taylor and I define a 5-week project. We know 2 things are crucial to success:
1. Actually talk to our main audience and learn from them.
2. Involve our Back of House leadership so that they understand the power of design and the value of research.
We plan remote interviews with owners/operators who make decisions on their restaurant technology. We diversify with a mix of small, medium and big restaurants, and a mix of new vs. established.
My role:
Plan and scope the research and project plan with my colleague.
Plan and execute recruitment (I recruited 6 of 8 participants).
Evaluative Research
We demo the existing Back of House site and gathered general feedback. We use the results to identify “quick fixes” to help strengthen our messaging and enhance the usability.
My role:
Plan the research guide (team collab).
Moderate and transcribe notes (team collab).
Analysis and synthesis (team collab).
Prioritization Research
We ask the same participants to tell us what Back of House features would be most desirable to them. We take the feedback to leadership for their expertise on actual viability and feasibility. The result is a detailed, well-prioritized roadmap using 14 “feature cards” based on research. The cards were grouped by business goals.
My role
Plan the research guide and materials using Miro software.
Plan and host a workshop with office colleagues to brainstorm more robust features (team collab).
Plan and moderate a workshop with leadership to prioritize opportunities (team collab).
Materials we created for the remote prioritization research with restaurant operators (Image has been blurred out due to its sensitive content).
Brainstorm workshop with colleagues.
Brainstorm workshop template for colleagues (sensitive information, hence the image size).
Template for the leadership workshop (sensitive information, hence the image size)
Deliverables
1. A descriptive deck: Research insights and actionable quick fixes for the Back of House site.
2. A roadmap for leadership: An outline of “feature cards” with different breakdowns, and sorting based on desirability, viability and feasibility.
My role:
Synthesize research findings and frameworks (team collab).
Plan the deck storytelling.
Write content for quick fixes, introduction and a few “feature cards.”
Present to leadership and office colleagues (team collab).
Example of ONE of the 14 feature card (image blurred out due to sensitive content)
Slide explaining how different types of research informed the project.
Example of ONE of the 14 feature card (image blurred out due to sensitive content)
Descriptive deck preview (sensitive information has been blurred out)