Seamless Dining By GrubhubOur team had 10 days to design a new point-of-sale system for Grubhub to bring
efficiency to restaurants who use on-demand delivery and takeout platforms.
This is how we did it.
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B R A N D R E S E A R C H
Grubhub is by far the largest of the on-demand
food delivery platforms, with more than 40,000
local restaurants in more than 900 cities across the
U.S. and the U.K. Grubhub’s target market is
primarily independent mom-and-pop
restaurants. According to Grubhub’s October 2015
economic impact study:
1. After joining Grubhub, restaurants grew their
monthly takeout revenue by an average of 30
percent.
2. One in five restaurants doubles its revenue after
working with Grubhub.
3. Grubhub cuts restaurant processing time by
more than 50 percent.
Knowing that efficiency, convenience and
customer service were the biggest drivers of
innovation at Grubhub, we knew that our proposal
to expand into the dine-in process would only add
value to Grubhub’s business model.
“ “[Our three KPIs have always been]
Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction.”
— Grubhub co-founder Mike Evans
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C O M P E T I T I V E & C O M PA R AT I V E A N A LY S I S
For our competitive and comparative
analysis, we examined seven different
point-of-sale (POS) offerings, such as
Square, Revel Systems, ShopKeep and
TouchBistro. Through feature comparison,
we tabulated the features of each. However,
because of our limited access to these
closed systems, contextual inquiry at
several restaurants became a necessity to
better understand how users — in this case,
servers, hostesses, managers and other
restaurant staff — approached them.
Nonetheless, our analysis helped us figure
out who the competitors were and
understand the expectations in the market.
We also did research on the restaurant
reservation app OpenTable in the event
that feature became an essential part of our design.
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S U RV E Y S & I N T E RV I E W S
In order to narrow the field of users to survey and
interview, we assembled a screener with five
questions and posted it on Slack, Facebook and
Twitter. The questions were meant to draw out
users who have worked in the restaurant business
and/or used an on-demand food delivery platform.
We got 21 responses.
From those 21, we sent out a follow-up survey to
respondents whom we couldn’t interview face-to-
face. We asked 10 questions about their point-of-
sale (POS) experience, as well as, how a front-of-
house (FOH) operates. We got 10 responses back.
We conducted a total of three interviews. Of the
users we talked to, two currently work in the
restaurant business, while one no longer works in
the food industry. Our goal in these 30- to- 45-
minute conversations was to discover motivations,
behaviors and pain points.
S U RV E Y R E S U LT SS C R E E N E R R E S U LT S
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C O N T E X T U A L I N Q U I R I E S
This was a vital part of our research, as it
exposed us not only to how a restaurant
processed in-house orders through their
current POS systems, but also how they
multitasked with Grubhub and other on-
demand delivery services. We did 7 in NYC,
1 in New Jersey.
The biggest moment for us during this
entire project happened on our visit to
Jack’s Sliders & Sushi on 3rd Avenue: The
hostess station revealed a control center of
more than five screens, each one tapped into
a delivery app.
Everywhere we went, we observed similar
pain points in how restaurants were
processing orders, particularly in
multitasking between in-house and on-
demand delivery orders. The findings
validated our overall research.
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T H E P R O B L E M & O P P O RT U N I T Y S TAT E M E N T
The problem statement: “Restaurants
want to consolidate Grubhub and their
current POS systems to improve their
workflow and efficiency.”
Grubhub has monopolized on the
takeout experience, completely
understanding the delivery needs of
restaurants. However, restaurants who
offer delivery and takeout need to be
accessible from a variety of platforms
(DoorDash, Grubhub, etc.) to increase
revenue.
The target market for this pilot would be
the independent restaurants that use the
Grubhub app and an in-house dine-in
POS system.
Increase e!ciency
Process orders in a
timely manner
Deliver orders on time
Happy customers
U S E R N E E D S
Finding an optimal solution to our problem will come from where the business needs and user needs come together.
S E E K I N G A S O LU T I O N
Increase revenue
Maintainrelationships withcurrent partners
Acquire newpartnerships
Expand into new markets
B U S I N E S S N E E D S
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F E AT U R E P R I O R I T I Z AT I O N
We put our focus on the features we deemed
“Most Important” that required the least amount
of effort or cost. The “Musts” on the right side of
the chart became our main focus to complete to
achieve our MVP, or minimum viable product.
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The Floor Manager Gerardo, 38
The Hostess Laura, 24
The Waitress Natalie, 21
“I shouldn’t have to work so hard to get things done.”
“I’m too distracted by deliveries to focus on our guests.”
“I won’t split a check more than three ways. It’s a pain.”
P E R S O N A S
From the affinity mapping, we
developed three personas — Gerardo, a floor manager; Laura,
a hostess; and Natalie, a waitress.
Gerardo and Laura would deal
directly with delivery, take-out
and dine-in orders for our new
app.
Gerardo would be our primary
user, as he would not only would
need to know how to use every
feature of the app on a daily basis,
he would need to customize it for
his restaurant staff ’s workflows.
Waiters and waitresses were going
to use the system most. Natalie
would fit that role.
Pain Points
Slow, antiquated POS interface
Menu updating and correcting
Wasting time and money on inefficient workarounds
Pain Points
Can’t focus on hospitality with so many delivery and takeouts coming in to her station
Too many screens between POS and laptop or iPad.
Complicated POS interface that doesn’t give enough feedback
Sending back order questions to Grubhub customers
Pain Points
Specials are hard to process because they are not inputted into the system.
Add-ons and omissions have to be typed into the system as a note.
Not knowing when an item has been 86’ed.
Have to jump between the register and table to process orders, payments and tips.
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S K E T C H I N G , W I R E F R A M I N G & P R O T O T Y P I N G
Through the golden thread of our
personas, we started the process of
ideating features for the app — first
on a whiteboard, then through
individual sketches, then in
wireframes, with each successive
stage refining the details, bringing
more focus to each feature.
From our medium-fidelity
sketches, we built the first
iteration of our prototype in
InVision. The first prototype
would be mostly in black-and-
white to help users testing the
app to focus on the functionality
and not the visual design.
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U S E R T E S T I N G
We conducted four user tests. Three out of four
users were current restaurant employees. We put
an iPad loaded with the prototype in front of
them and, after allowing them to talk about their
initial impressions, gave the user a couple of
scenarios from our testing script. This is some of
what we learned …
1. The messaging on add-on and coursing
prompts was unclear. We would add headings
for each prompt as well as separate beverages
and courses.
2. They would like to be prompted when a
Grubhub order has been unattended to for 5 minutes.
3. Users weren’t clear on what “tickets” in
navigation meant. Users shouldn’t have go
guess where something will lead them. We
changed this to “Open Tabs.”
“You are a floor manager at The Coffee Shop. … Can you walk me through how
you’d process an order for Table W1?”
— Our scenario as presented to our users during testing
“
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T H E U S E R F L O W
Our user flow is for our primary
persona, the busy manager who
needs to multitask between putting
in an in-house order and dealing with
incoming Grubhub requests.
Each staffer would need to login to
the POS system before they are taken
to a primary landing screen — the
floor plan screen. From there, they
would look for notifications from
Grubhub, as well as be able to process
in-house orders simultaneously.
This is how the user would navigate
through the app.
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T H E S E C O N D I T E R AT I O N
Based on the feedback from our user testing,
changes we made to the app included …
1. Bringing Grubhub brand color and
messaging into the tool bar, prompts,
feedback and into the call-to-action
buttons.
2. We improved the add-on pop-ups to be
more intuitive through language and color.
3. We added a prompt to notify users when
a Grubhub order has waited too long
before being fired.
4. Simplified icons in the tool bar further.
5. Making icon messaging more intuitive:
“Tickets” becomes “Open Tabs.”
6. “Reservations” was removed in favor of
having accessibility to “Business Analytics”
in the tab bar.
7. We added more feedback during credit
card processing.
L O G I N S C R E E N F L O O R P L A N
O R D E R S C R E E N PAY M E N T C O N F I R M AT I O N
DONE!sweston.com [email protected]
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INTRO 1
BRAND RESEARCH 2
COMPETITIVE & COMPARATIVE RESEARCH 3
SURVEYS & INTERVIEWS 4
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES 5
THE PROBLEM & OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT 6
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION 7
PERSONAS 8
SKETCHING, WIREFRAMING & PROTOTYPING 9
USER TESTING 10
THE USER FLOW 11
THE SECOND ITERATION 12
Read the full case study, “Seamless Dining by Grubhub,” at sweston.com.