We first met Sides about two years in the past via our mutual buddies. They stated that they had 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 purposeful 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 cope with all the next for the restaurant companies:
- attracting and retaining prospects (bonus system and web site);
- receiving and processing orders (net store, POS system, name heart, 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 fancy perform to achieve success. Probably the most aggressive ones already had a wonderful person expertise. And that’s what Sides additionally realized proper earlier than turning to us.
Problem
As we discovered afterward, Sides needed to deal with the onboarding half within the first place. New customers needed to spend round two working days to determine learn how to work with the platform. Not solely did the method take too lengthy — nevertheless it was usually unclear. We imagined there was room for unpleasantness on the customers’ aspect in the course of the onboarding stage. The product crew agreed to that and stated that it led to a few penalties for his or her enterprise.
To begin with, a number of the prospects would naturally bounce off throughout this stage because of the size of the onboarding stage and its unclarity. Secondly, the shopper assist crew was all the time overwhelmed with the how-to sort of questions from newcomers. Sides needed to make a greater expertise for his or her customers, a step instantly related to their enterprise success.
Course of
We shook fingers and began researching the platform simply as common customers would do. That’s part of our ordinary course of: we attempt to step into customers’ sneakers so the testing could be an sincere experiment. Nevertheless, we ended up confused. And shocked. We’d seen and constructed fairly just a few merchandise, however nonetheless, there have been elements we couldn’t determine on our personal.
Though the Sides crew supplied explanations, we felt overwhelmed with the performance and confused in regards to the total impression of the product. So, we stored researching, turning to the product crew relatively usually.
We additionally talked in regards to the buyer eventualities, core performance, and limitations. We discovered in regards to the product crew’s perspective on what needed to be improved and the data that supported their imaginative and prescient. Specifically, we acquired metrics knowledge, which we used to research 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 circulation for buyer onboarding and performed an preliminary sequence of workshops with the product crew.
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 similar time, there have been those that had been utilizing Sides for some time and gotten accustomed to the product the best way it was. Due to this fact, the brand new design had not solely to unravel issues however do it in a kind of acquainted approach.
After the analysis part and our preliminary prototyping, we ended up with an inventory of the challenges all through the product — these we have been going to deal with with the design. Primarily based on the listing, we prototyped, examined, and refined new parts, sections, and person flows, one after the other addressing every level of the listing. It was a hybrid type of collaboration, which consisted of a giant piece of our autonomous work and a vital a part of our collaboration with Sides (doing workshops and numerous crew periods).
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 prospects might be confused.
3. Structured the dashboard half to make the crew studying quick and the administration course of easy.
4. Improved the search and navigation via the platform so prospects might simply discover something they wanted.
We labored collectively for round two years, redesigning, adapting, and creating new stuff that will match the entire ecosystem. Because the modifications have been applied, the product crew has been sharing with us that their metrics have been regularly bettering.
