Ziosk MENU ORDERING (2010-2011)
What is Ziosk?
Ziosk is a table ordering tablet for casual dining restaurants that allows guests to reorder drinks, order from the menu, play games, and pay-at-the-table. Ziosk’s success in the dining space is dependent on being ingrained in the restaurants steps of service and to create additional revenue through branded promotions and game sales.
Key Goal?
Create a menu ordering system capable of delivering an experience that is intuitive for the greatest band of users and that can assist wait staff, and create opportunities for increased sales.
My Role.
I was the user experience designer and the visual creative lead. I collaborated primarily with the CMO, marketing manager, an implementation specialist and had a small team of junior designers to help flesh out key frames once we moved into visual execution.
The PROCESS
I used a variant of IDEO’s Human-Centered Design thinking process to ensure design decisions were supported by user research, feedback, and created opportunity to help find flaws in our data models.
EMPATHIZE
25 Chili's and Applebee's employee interviews.
50+ guest intercepts.
Multiple workshops with Ziosk implementation specialists.
Environmental analysis if Applebee's steps of service.
DEFINE
Identified key product features.
Storyboard of guest experience.
Live prototyping workshops where we simulated ordering experience with words and acting out processes with paper.
IDEATE
Created multiple sitemaps of Ziosk content that would represent various testing scenarios which accounted for:
Sitemaps: Account for various levels of ordering, full versus limited.
Navigation: Different primary nav hierarchy's so we could review funnel data and determine optimum organization based on A/B tests.
'Screen saver' strategy: We aligned passive offerings to steps of service and relevant part of guests dining cycle.
Wireframes: Lofi wireframes of ordering sequence.
PROTOTYPE
I led the creative team to design a branded prototype built in Flash and loaded onto a Ziosk. This allowed us to simulate the experience in the office and with our client without writing any code with the POS system or CMS.
Led design team to create editable production templates and design standards so we could quickly role new design system out to other restaurant brands.
VALIDATE
(across multiple CHAINS)
A/B test scenarios for full and limited ordering.
Tracked funnel data to determine when users became lost or gave up.
See-say-do data collection.
OUTCOME
The reality is that full menu ordering is a difficult challenge when one tablet may be used to provide service for a table of more than 2 people. This can make complicated orders a bit cumbersome for technology naïve guests. We found that full menu ordering was best suited for bar tops, lounge areas and express lunch areas of a restaurant.
A few restaurant brands opted to limit order entry process to appetizers and desserts as those have few modification and easily align to the more passive time during the beginning and the end of a customer’s experience.
The order entry system designed is still in use 6 years after its original development. It is utilized in all 50 states, and is used by over 50 million guests a month on more than 177,000 screens.