We first met Sides about two years in the past by our mutual pals. They mentioned 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 facet had been actively evolving, they hadn’t made many adjustments 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 selected 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 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 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 handle the onboarding half within the first place. New customers needed to spend round two working days to determine find out how to work with the platform. Not solely did the method take too lengthy — but it surely was typically unclear. We imagined there was room for unpleasantness on the customers’ facet throughout the onboarding stage. The product workforce agreed to that and mentioned that it led to a few penalties for his or her enterprise.
To begin with, a few of the clients would naturally bounce off throughout this stage because of the size of the onboarding stage and its unclarity. Secondly, the client help workforce was all the time 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 common course of: we attempt to step into customers’ sneakers so the testing could be an trustworthy experiment. Nonetheless, we ended up confused. And stunned. We’d seen and constructed fairly just a few merchandise, however nonetheless, there have been elements we couldn’t work out on our personal.
Though the Sides workforce supplied explanations, we felt overwhelmed with the performance and confused in regards to the general impression of the product. So, we stored researching, turning to the product workforce slightly typically.
We additionally talked in regards to the buyer eventualities, core performance, and limitations. We discovered in regards to the product workforce’s perspective on what needed to be improved and the data that supported their imaginative and prescient. Particularly, we acquired metrics information, which we used to research the platform’s usability additional.
Subsequent, we studied the approaches amongst rivals, added finest practices of complicated SaaS merchandise from different domains, and mixed all the data we had gotten up to now. 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 carried out an preliminary collection of workshops with the product workforce.
Within the course of, we found different ache factors down the client 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 way in which it was. Due to this fact, the brand new design had not solely to resolve issues however do it in a type of acquainted approach.
After the analysis section and our preliminary prototyping, we ended up with an inventory of the challenges all through the product — these we have been going to handle 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 an important a part of our collaboration with Sides (doing workshops and varied 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 could possibly 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 will match the entire ecosystem. Because the adjustments have been carried out, the product workforce has been sharing with us that their metrics have been steadily bettering.
