Menu Management System Upgrade

Role: Project Manager, UX/UI Researcher & Designer

Team: Cedric Ingram, Grace Badagliacca, Gabrielle Sirota

Timeline: September 2019 - April 2020

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Overview

I worked on a UX project for my senior year capstone project in the School of Information. I was assigned to a real client along with a group with three other students to assess and analyze user needs and user requirements based on client needs. We worked on this project over the course of two semesters. Due to non-disclosure agreements, I’m unable to provide all the details of my work and the final prototype, but have outlined our process along with some deliverables. Please contact me to chat more about my experience on this capstone project.

Team on a Zoom Meeting!

Team on a Zoom Meeting!

 

Project brief

How might we optimize a menu management tool used by employees who manage product menus for Taco Bell to reduce the amount of errors when adding new items?

The admin tool needed to better recognize how users will add new items to the store menu, edit existing items in various ways, and remove a product or its variations.

 

Research

Goals:

  1. Determine user pain points in the current system’s process.

  2. Understand general sentiment of administrative users regarding efficiency and

    accuracy of the system.

  3. Support or reject initial predictions/hypotheses (i.e., lack of error prevention/status

    updates will cause confusion and increase mistakes)

After analyzing our research, we hoped to answer the following questions:

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Research methods

Based on our project goals to create an efficient and intuitive menu management system for Taco Bell, we utilized various research methods to direct the design process. These methods included: interviews with current admin users, competitive/ comparative analyses, and card sorting. These various methods enabled us to develop user personas, a journey map, and UX requirements. Based on our research, we also identified current pain points in the process, brainstormed a concise information architecture, and created easy interactions with the product for users.

 
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Design

White-boarding & Sketches

We utilized a whiteboard to draw out the information architecture of our system. As there are multiple different ways a user can navigate through the system, we wanted to nail down a specific user flow before creating initial designs in order to ensure that we were including all the necessary information and steps that already existed within the current system. After understanding the information architecture and flow, our team sketched out different home page designs on paper to brainstorm different versions and approaches we could take on the main home screen.

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Low Fidelity Wireframes

Following our sketch sessions, each of our design team members then individually crafted lo-fidelity mockups with the screens for the main functions of the system, keeping our design requirements in mind. They then presented their ideas to one another, and we were then able to combine certain components of each person’s designs to develop more concrete low-fidelity wireframes.

 
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Testing

Validation

We conducted 4 usability tests in order to evaluate whether the design was intuitive or not, for both power users (users who have substantial experience with the previous system and tasks) and non-familiar users.

We analyzed the test results based on success metrics of completion, confidence, time-to-complete, and user feedback.

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High fidelity wireframes

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Reflection

Key takeaways

  1. Define the scope of your project before designing. When starting the design phase, we felt that there were an overwhelming amount of flows to create. However, we were able to communicate with our client to decide what was actually feasible and prioritize certain features and functions.

  2. The importance of understanding the system you are working with. We were somewhat delayed during the beginning of our project as we conducted research and usability tests with a different system in mind. However, we were able to gain a better grasp of the system by designing low-fidelity prototypes and exploring pre-existing system features.

  3. The insights you can only gather by talking to expert users. When analyzing the existing system, our team brainstormed some design changes we wanted to implement, however the most beneficial insights came from our discussion with actual users that ultimately informed our design choices. Understanding their goals when interacting with the system and building empathy for them when encountering pain points was key to not only our initial and final designs, but also our requirements.

  4. Leadership & Adaptability. As the project manager, I had to learn and experiment with ways to effectively communicate with my team and client to successfully complete assignments on time while assigning tasks to each member on my team. Furthermore, we had to adapt to remote group meetings due to COVID-19. As we were already meeting with our client remotely throughout the year, we were able to quickly acclimate to meetings online to finalize our prototype.