A project that was destroyed and later revived by covid.
Hi I’m Sagar! And this is my first case study about my first fulltime job. I worked on this module in February 2020 (about a month before lockdown) and finally I wrote a case study about it.
Background
Olik is a consumer tech startup, with a mission to reduce the waiting time of users with innovative solutions. It was founded in 2019 by Mr. Ashish Jain & Mr. Mohit Verma. They noticed that waiting time at restaurants was a major pain point for people. The rush increased exponentially during peak hours and restaurants struggled to manage hungry customers. The service time was high while CX was low.
They decided to solve this problem with a contactless dining solution and I was hired as the sole UI/UX Designer to design it from scratch along with other modules (Will talk about them someday else :P).
Understanding the Problem
Contactless dining wasn’t common in India at that time. This was an advantage as there were less competitors (even DotPe was founded in March) but a disadvantage as merchants were unwilling to adopt. I had to design a solution that improved CX and was enticing for merchants.
Research & Analysis
1. User Research
The whole team conducted a user research amongst their family & friends. It was a basic interaction to understand what problems do people face while dining. Here are the most common ones -
- Limited physical menus provided, trouble sharing them in a big group
- Waiters don’t listen to requests especially during peak hours
- Customization requests aren’t communicated to the kitchen
- No proper communication in case of delay in preparation
- Troubles in splitting bill and limited payment options
- No coupons & discounts like online food aggregators
2. Competitor Analysis
I started off with analyzing the few competitors in this domain. I went through the user reviews to understand what worked and what didn’t for them. I also analyzed apps of Indian food aggregators to understand how a digital menu should be designed.
3. Merchant Interaction
On talking to a few merchants, these pain points were identified -
- Commission or charges for service by online aggregators are too high
- No space for branding in digital menus
- Hard to use merchant app for managing orders & requests
- No integration with POS systems to make billing effortless
Curating a User Journey
- It’s lunch time on a regular office day. Aman, Karan and Anurag walk into a restaurant and sit at their table.
- They open Olik App and scan QR code from the standee placed at their table (A weblink was added in later stages that opens menu in the browser).
- Aman sends a request to clean the table and serve water.
- Meanwhile, Karan and Anurag browse the digital menu and decide what to order.
- Both of them order a dish along with a drink for themselves while Aman orders only a salad.
- Their order with customization request is sent directly to the kitchen and food is prepared.
- They get prompt notifications in the app about their individual order status. Once food is prepared, they walk to the counter and collect their order (Can be served to the table as well).
- Karan requests for cutlery which is provided without any hassles and they enjoy their meal.
- It’s billing time and Anurag as usual is running out of money, Aman selects to pays for himself and Anurag via UPI from Olik App while Karan pays his own bill via cash.
- Merchant receives their payment, marks the order complete and table status changes automatically to “Unoccupied”.
Designing an MVP
“A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.”
In this section, I’ll be talking about each and every problem that was identified earlier and explain how I solved it. P.S I am not gonna bore you with complex flowcharts and random sketches.
Why flip when you can scroll
I eliminated the need to share a menu, anyone on the table can simply scan QR code on the standee and browse their own digital menu. I decided to not re-invent the wheel for digital menu and go for a similar design as Swiggy, Zomato. Contactless dining was something that people weren’t familiar with at that time and designing a totally different UX would have added to their learning curve which might’ve frustrated them.
I also solved merchants’ problem here and provided an optional branding space before each section of the menu. They could add images like promotional offers or images of their dishes (like they post on Instagram) or simply names of that section in their brand colour and typeface (like in physical menus).
“Jakob’s Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
No more “Excuse me!”
Scanning QR code on the standee takes user to landing screen of that restaurant. I added a “Request to” section right there so that users can make a service request and send it directly to a waiter who can then fulfill it. Users can just tap on ready-made requests or even type their own.
Where’s my order?
Proper order status was provided for each individual dish. The status was sent via notification and tags were added besides each dish. The colour of tags were according to Traffic Signal colour scheme. Merchant had to just accept an order and mark it as served once done, status updates would be sent automatically.
Splitting bills made easy
I gave the users an option to either pay for themselves or for someone else or for the complete table. “Pay for XYZ person” switch was strategically placed below other person’s bill amount in order to reduce discrepancies. This feature made splitting the bill hassle free and users had multiple payment options. I also added a coupons section on payment popup.
There were some drawbacks of this like it could only be used if multiple users of same table scanned and ordered food from their individual devices. But this was an MVP and improvements were to be made based on user feedback.
Merchant Problems
I tried to solve what I could with design like providing branding space. We also made a Merchant App with logins for manager and waiters to manage bills and service requests. Rest were product calls like setting commission rates and integrating with POS systems and were handled by the founders.
Locked down into archives
Even before my designs could go into user testing, covid happened and a lockdown was imposed in India on 24th March, 2020. All restaurants were shut down and people were panicking. This whole project was put on hold and the company pivoted to solve other problems (I’ll tell that story next time promise!).
But but but…
After a few months, lockdown restrictions were gradually lifted and restaurants started opening up. Contactless dining was the new normal and finally this module was picked up. Sales team onboarded about 50 restaurants in Delhi NCR but there were already some tough competitors in this business now.
The founders made a call and this module was shut down as the company had some other plans.
My Learnings
It was a great learning experience for me. I got the chance to work closely with Mr. Ashish Jain (CEO) & Mr. Mohit Verma (CTO) and understand how to keep a company running even during a pandemic. I researched and designed a product that was not so common. There were times when data wasn’t there I had to trust my instincts (Though proper user testing was on the roadmap).
And finally that things don’t always work out as we want them to but we shouldn’t lose hope.
Congratulations on reaching here, your attention span is amazing in this generation of TikToks. Thank you for your time.
