Nomi seeks to empower the restaurant industry through technology, enabling small, independent restaurants to adapt to evolving customer demands through responsive restaurant management tools and mobile menus.
WHAT I DID
SKILLS
Product Design
UX Research
UX Design
UI Design
TOOLS
Figma
Procreate
Illustrator
This case study will focus on my process in designing the onboarding flow for managing multiple restaurant locations through the same account.
How might we create an onboarding flow that allows restaurants to access and update menus in multiple locations?
Insights drawn from previous user interviews with restaurant industry leaders revealed that more interactive, responsive, and customizable mobile menus are desired in light of COVID-19 and technologically developing industry.
As Nomi begins to scale to more restaurants to meet these needs, it is imperative that we improve user's onboarding experience and allow flexibility and scalability for new customers in accessing multiple locations through the same account.
PRODUCT PREVIEW
A Sneak Peek
Editing and adding multiple restaurant locations with ease.
Through restaurant cards, users can quickly add and edit multiple locations while onboarding.
Practicing forgiving UI.
Requiring minimal information to get an account up and running, while providing accessible ways to edit restaurant infromation.
Establishing Nomi's voice through consistent and thoughtful branding.
Communicating Nomi's commitment to partnering with restaurants and building trust by practicing consistency with colors, components, and branding.
USER RESEARCH
Who's In Charge?
Auditing Previous Designs
Previous designs tie user accounts to a singular restaurant account, which does not permit scalability to multiple restaurant locations nor multiple administrator accounts.
The onboarding design also attempts to provide fields for integration inputs through websites or Yelp, but functionally does not derive information from those sources. Including these input link fields may contribute to user dissatisfaction for the lack of automated menu information sourcing.
Figure 1: The original design, which featured three primary steps, but did not allow for flexibility in additing new restaurants.
Apart from usability, the user interfaces do not align with Nomi's friendly branding and renewed style guide, which may pose a challenge for a small start-up like Nomi in establishing a strong brand identity, trust with users, and aesthetic-usability reputation.
Defining Primary Users
Before designing, I was able to speak with four individuals of varying technology and management experience within the restaurant industry. These discovery interviews aimed to determine product structure needs, decipher industry standards and competitive products, and validate previous prototypes and designs.
KEY QUESTIONS
01
Who are the primary users for this admin portal? Will it primarily be restaurant management staff, or possible integration to the broader team?
02
How great of a need do users have for cross-location account sharing? Are these users a subset of the general pool (are they the rule or the exception)?
03
What are current tools you are using and what are their limitations?
04
And, a favorite question from one of our founders: if you had a magic tool that could solve your biggest pain point, what would that look like?
Interview Insights
Through these interviews, our solution for onboarding should satisfy the following:
Reduce repetitive actions — time is money.
Competitive products such as Square and Toast have bulk actions that span across multiple restaurant locations, yet still largely require a lot of clicking around. Onboarding designs should be simple, elegant, and easy to use.
Pare down onboarding to capture only account information essentials.
Although only one interviewee was not himself familiar with digital products in the restaurant space, using a new product can be intimidating, especially complex and feature-rich tools that dominate the digital restaurant space. Making use of progressive disclosure of product features will allow users to better acclimate to using the product.
All-in-one, eventually.
Restaurants expressed the desire for flexible and scalable accounts, where they could manage multiple locations from one account.
INFO ARCH
Organizing Complexity
Two other designers and I tackled these questions through weekly design sprints, where we came with explorations and improved upon each other's designs each week. For three weeks, we refined the onboarding experience with account to user interviews, product and engineering feedback, and internal design critiques.
Architecture
Nailing down restaurant organization structure aided in constructing a visual hierarchy for account creation. Depicted below is the general structure for restaurant brand, location, and menu organization:
With this basic framework and inspiration from user interviews and competitors, the following section outlines my iterative process, as well as specific issues that arose and were resolved.
ITERATIONS & EXPLORATIONS
The Refinement Process
A total of three iterations were created, each taking into account critiques from my teammates, new insights from business partners, roadmap guidance from product, and technical specifications from engineering. Below accounts for my chronological explorative and collaborative process in designing the new onboarding framework.
EXPLORATION I
Organization
Abiding by a pared-down product philosophy and designing from this information framework, I distilled the onboarding process into a simple three-step process:
At baseline, restaurants create a cohort of individual restaurants, which restaurants can later group to manage multiple locations at once.
Personal account creation
Restaurant information
Account creation confirmation
EXPLORATION II
Organization
The primary critiques of my first iteration centered on whether restaurants should be automatically nested under the same label or created as independent entities during the onboarding process.
Creating brands would parallel restaurant organization hierarchy. For instance, our partner corporation, the Bacari Restaurant Group, owns and operates two brands: the Bacari (under which multiple locations operate) and Nature's Brew.
However, drawn from initial user interviews and design audits from competitors, we tried to keep onboarding as simple as possible, removing barriers to entry and cognitive load. Furthermore, although our primary partner is a large chain, outreach to more businesses led us to account for smaller, independent restaurants as potential users. Thus, we decided to keep restaurants as separate entities during onboarding, and create subdivisions after account creation.
EXPLORATION III
Card Motif
The primary critiques of my first iteration centered on whether restaurants should be automatically nested under the same label or created as independent entities during the onboarding process.
Creating brands would parallel restaurant organization hierarchy. For instance, our partner corporation, the Bacari Restaurant Group, owns and operates two brands: the Bacari (under which multiple locations operate) and Nature's Brew.
However, drawn from initial user interviews and design audits from competitors, we tried to keep onboarding as simple as possible, removing barriers to entry and cognitive load. Furthermore, although our primary partner is a large chain, outreach to more businesses led us to account for smaller, independent restaurants as potential users. Thus, we decided to keep restaurants as separate entities during onboarding, and create subdivisions after account creation.
EXPLORATION IV
Team Framework
Although this exploration was out-of-scope given engineering constraints for implementing baseline requirements, this team invitations framework was set for implementation at a later date, and influenced my current work on permissions and team management.
Although this exploration was out-of-scope given engineering constraints for implementing baseline requirements, this team invitations framework was set for implementation at a later date, and influenced my current work on permissions and team management.
FINAL
The Final Deliverable
BRANDING
Discovering Nomi's Voice
Through setting the tone of our product through onboarding, I hoped to convey Nomi's approachable, friendly, and customer-driven values through sketch-like graphical assets, to pair with a new branding guide our team created.
Figure 2: In co-creating Nomi's renewed branding, I focused on portraying both a professional and playful tone to Nomi colors and imagery. This has informed the doodle-motif, as well as orange and teal complementary, contrasting colors that convey our values of accessibility and clarity.
REFLECTIONS
Key Learnings
Working on the onboarding experience shed light on future needs of new stakeholders and ways in which the product can evolve.
Iterate, validate, then iterate again.
Even with simple sketches and conceptual ideas/musings, just get the ideas out there. I often struggle with getting started because I think I have to come up with THE solution at first glance. But workshopping ideas, no matter how fringe or unrelated they may seem, can yield future product features and updates.
Know the state of the industry/ecosystem you are designing for.
It’s unlikely that you are as familiar with the in’s and out’s of the industry you are designing for. Actively seek to learn more about the way people work and the current state of the ecosystem you are designing for. What is the need you are actually trying to address? What are competitors doing? And what makes your product unique?
Keep in mind engineering priorities and capacities.
Especially at a small, student-run start-up, resources are limited and product goals gear towards more immediate needs instead of broader product visions.
MOVING FORWARD
As Nomi continues to evolve and grow, developing all-in-one and comprehensive restaurant management solutions has become a top priority. My small exploration into team invites led me to further explore potential opportunities to fill gaps in staff management, from customizable role-specific permissions to payroll and benefits management integration. I will now be expanding on my ideas for permissions and team management tools, potentially creating an all-in-one solution for both menu and staff (payroll) management.
SPECIAL THANKS
Nomi was my first experience working on a product that you could actually hold in your hands, interact with, and see in out there in the wild (which was indeed wild for me). But without the support and guidance from a few key people, I would not have had the confidence nor sought to hone my skills. I could not thank
Ruth Chen enough for leading our design team through every crit, providing thoughtful and patient feedback, and simply being a friend during this entire learning experience. I also want to shout out
Mac Baker and
Zack Sullens for trusting me with a part of your baby that is Nomi, and for inspiring me to continue pursing what I love.
