The Opportunity
The pandemic has reshaped restaurant operations, emphasizing resilience and technology reliance. How might we design technological solutions that streamline service and improve customer experience?
The Objective
Design an ecosystem of products strategically aligned with NCR Voyix offerings, considering competitive market integration.
01
Research
Outdated Practices
After going out to 10 restaurants, touring back of house, and speaking to employees, owners, and customers we found that restaurants were underusing technological resources available to them.
10
Restaurants Studied
14
Interviews
10
Service & Tech Trends
20 hrs
of Video Footage
The Current Experience
Using a service blueprint, we charted the system flow of current systems in the FOH and BOH. We looked specifically at the employee facing paint points in the highlighted areas.
02
Understanding Users
Efficiency and Communicating
We found that are users are primarily concerned with efficiency and effective communication. Technology is often obtrusive and has high-cognitive load in these intense environments, which detracts from productivity.
Insights
We generated 3 categories that contained insights from our research. Using these, we created a core objective with 3 focal points.
Written Information
Owners/staff hesitate to use new technology
Verbal Communication
Miscommunication between staff in the loud, chaotic environment
Organizing Information
Material scattered digital and physically
03
Synthesis
Innovation Opportunity
The innovation opportunity lies in enhancing existing restaurant service systems by refining user flows for improved communication and organization with IoT and AI technology.
Design Philosophy
We coined the term "Silent Butler" as the foundation for our design decisions in regards to how users interact with technology.
04
Final Objective
Final Design
Our design objective was to design an internet of things and AI enhanced ecosystem that tackles customer order taking, employee order processing, and operator task management.
Centralized Management solution
Operators and managers are juggling many different platforms for scheduling, metrics, inventory, and live-updates. We took all this and combined it into a single platform
Efficiency Heat Map
Using a digital twin of the restaurants, operators can track bottlenecks in service through a heat map. They can reassign staff to tasks to address these issues.
AI-Voice Ordering
The POS automatically populates with the customer order as they say it out to the FOH employee.
05
Behind the Design
Concept Dev. / User Testing
We generated over 30 concepts and evaluated them against our design criteria. Once we had our design, we went back to our users for testing. Chick-fil-A operator John Diamond was an invaluable resource and assisted with ideas like the efficiency heat map.
What I learned
With consistent presentations for the client, we had to distill down hours of research into clear, concise information. Formal presentations to the VP design + design team taught me professionalism.
Skill Gained
Market research, trend research, user interviews, UX, UI, 3D modeling (Fusion), rendering (Keyshot), video production (PremierePro), user testing, collaboration.
