Building tools to support and empower restaurant owners.
Storefront is delivery.com's merchant-facing platform used to accept and manage incoming orders. When I joined it was stuck in a phase of transitioning from a clunky, web-based platform to the Storefront app. The app was in dire need of features such as a menu editor to keep up with today's competitive industry. Since our food vertical made up the majority of our revenue, we approached this first for restaurant owners and designed with tablet in mind.
Planning & Research
The product manager and I kicked-off the project with the engineering and merchant development teams. With the engineering team, they were able to give us a rundown of how menus were structured. Our merchant development team interacts with restaurant owners on a daily basis and had rich feedback for us. Together we outlined, prioritized, and plan features for the menu editor. For example, we learned that restaurant owners edit the menu only 4-5 times a year and mostly to adjust prices. More often, there is a need to hide ingredients or dishes that are not available for the day due to inventory or supplier issues. We concluded that changing prices and hiding missing ingredients for the day (industry term 86) were our most prioritized features.
Research also consisted of looking at competitors with the intention that restaurants commonly have multiple delivery platforms set up. And in such a busy environment they needed something tap-friendly and easy to understand. For competitor research I combed through multiple delivery providers and their merchant-facing FAQs and screenshots to get a look at their platforms.
Design, Prototyping, Iterating
Based off what we initially had, there was a lot of room for improvement. Entirely new components were designed. Menu items had the ability to link to option group(s), price options, and could also assigned a schedule (i.e. lunch, dinner availability). Option groups were also broken down into required or optional, single or multiple selections. I worked with the lead Merchant Menu Developer to make sure every logic was translated into the new UI. Throughout the design phase there was a constant cycle of feedback with the Merchant Development team and 1 restaurant owner.
Advanced edit pulls up a modal.
Option Groups lived on a separate page.
User Testing
To validate my designs I arranged user testing with a restaurant owner. The owner regularly uses our platform as well as other competitors and therefore provided great feedback. In multiple sessions, I gathered insights on common behaviors as a restaurant owner and suggestions on how to make running their business easier.
