Design Overview

Managing food & restaurant operations is not an easy task. It involves many activities that engage the staff right from purchasing products, preparing food and beverage, keeping the inventory, and maintaining service quality continuously. OrderMaestro is a great customized e-commerce solution, offering a wide range of modules to enhance your online ordering experience. But unfortunately, it has never been available on mobile/tablet. Since our users are always on the go running their facilities having a mobile/tablet application was very crucial. In comparison, competing companies, already had their mobile applications launched, while OrderMaestro was still set to the desktop only.

Task at Hand

Assess the current UX state
Look into existing data
Identify business & product Issues
Set up short and long-term goals
OKR’s
Challenges we faced
Why new solution is better
Approach
Impact
Lessons learned
Next Steps

Problem Overview

OrderMaestro is the second largest product at iTradeNetwork. It has the biggest user base - 50,000 users. It allows us to hedge our bets vs the retail sector (50% of the “food dollar” is money spent for eating out rather than eating at home - Food Spending Study

OrderMaestro managed to lock the top 3 (out of 5) biggest foodservice operators and keep them as current customers, but because of outdated user experience, we barely have any new market penetration. It only gained 2 new customers in the last 3 years. It was a big warning for iTradeNetwork, showing that potential customers rather do business with our competitors. It put iTN at the back of the top companies list. Old technology has locked the company into inefficient workflows. Previous product management practices have allowed for numerous inefficient ways of doing the same thing. Having the application available on the desktop only slows down our customers’ workflow process, since 75% of their work time is to be on the go.

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How might we modernize, innovate and ease the work process of OrderMaestro to bring it to the top of the supply chain game?

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Business Issues:

The number of new operators/distributors is very low. It only has 12 customers currently. iTN managed to secure 2 new customers within the last 3 years.
iTN has lost a few of our recurring clients, which caused our revenue to drop by 36%.

Product Issues:

OrderMaestro is available on the desktop only. iTradeNetwork attempted to build a mobile application, but none of its customers used it.

Completing taking inventory in the offline mode was impossible. The data just simply couldn't be saved unless there is a service. So there is no benefit of the inventory module.

The search has very limited functionality, which causes errors in finding desired items

Users have no visibility of what's going on with their placed orders if they are not at their desks (they spend 75% of the time running around the facility)

Outdated UI. It brought to our attention that not only by our customers complain about our user interface, but also our sales team

There are currently no advanced implementations of machine learning in the platform

Setting Up Goals

Short-Term:

Launch OrderMaestro on mobile and tablet applications so users can do their work on the go and make iTN a stronger competitor in the market
Improve user experience so users can do more and minimize their time spent on their day-to-day tasks (searching for products, taking inventory and etc)
Update UI by using our new modern design system components in order to create a more appealing appearance, create consistency with the rest of iTN product suite, and increase future development speed as developers are able to swing between products as needed.
Reduce customer churn by introducing a new updated version of the desktop and our brand new mobile and tablet solutions that satisfy our users’ needs

Long-Term:

Supply iTN sales team with better user-friendly products that leave a positive impression so they can close more sales and bring new customers on the platform
Allow iTN customers to use the solution as their selling point so that they can gain the business of new units, which will be onboarded onto OrderMaestro which cause the increase in iTN revenue
Introduce machine learning so that central admins can do the following

Guide users toward promoted items
Suggest frequency bought with items to reduce mistakes
Create global categories for the benefit of their end users

OKR’s

Objective:

Develop mobile and tablet applications so users can do their work on the go

Key Results:

Set up user interviews to better understand users’ needs, goals, and workflow processes and identify pain points

Analyze competitors to understand the reasons why our customers choose them over iTN

Conduct usability studies of new mobile and tablet versions to measure the satisfaction rate

Collect customer feedback and do additional iterations of the designs

Start the development process and launch our mobile and tablet applications

UX Challenges

To make the transition from old designs to new designs as smooth as possible, because users don’t like change. They require effort to make and people don’t know what to expect from changes. Why People Don't Like Redesigns
Measuring the success metrics for taking inventory using a desktop application vs a mobile application is very difficult. We need to capture not only the time users spend on entering the remaining quantity of each inventory item into the system but also the time they spend in their physical locations looking for those products. If the first part of the task we can use our prototypes and measure the time, the second part is impossible because we won’t be able to observe the users without being present with them.
We have so many different viewports - phone, tablet, and desktop. All of them are equally important. It takes a lot of QA effort to make sure everything works correctly
Limited database of item images. Based on our user interviews, we discovered that item images are one of the main key factors in purchase-making decisions. It helps the users to find desired items faster and it gives an understanding of how the item looks like (packaging, colors, etc). And it’s just more appealing than “No Image” icon - Why Images Are Important In E-Commerce
Limited resources and short deadlines. All of the OrderMaestro customers are large bureaucratic enterprises. Scheduling user interviews has to happen sometimes multiple weeks in advance, adding huge amounts of time to the design process and corresponding feedback cycle. B2B software and proprietary collateral is hard to find online legally. We are limited in knowing our competitors’ feature sets because we have to build them from their press releases and publicly available collateral.

UX Solutions

Mobile and Tablet Apps. Now users can do all their day-to-day tasks on the go

Elastic Search. It allows fuzzy searching so that the users never have to remember the exact product description to find it across all order guides/catalogs
Barcode Scan. Using our mobile and tablet solution allows the user to easily scan the product barcode and find the product across all order guides and successfully add it to their shopping cart

Offline Inventory Mode. Taking inventory became so easy because even if there is no service, the user still can go through all inventory locations and enter the remaining quantity, which will be saved and synced automatically after the service connection is restored

Notifications. With our pop notification feature, the users will always have visibility of what is going on with their orders. Substitutions, out-of-stock items, order status changes, announcements, and any other important information will be available to the user through the notification center whenever they go

Approach

Conducted User Interviews with our current users to better understand their workflow, goals, needs, and pain points.
Researched Competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to our solution and to find a gap in the market. Analyzed some consumer-based e-commerce solutions, which are not our direct competitors to get more comprehensive information and useful insights on features that can be beneficial for our app (made competitive and comparative analysis)

Created Empathy Map to gain a deeper insight into our users. To understand what they think, do, say and what emotions they experience, and what they fear and gain while using our solution

Spoke to our development team to better understand what Technical Restrictions

Made my focus to create a solution that will help our users to do their day-to-day work tasks on the go because they spend 75% of work time running around their facility

Did some research on how much time mobile B2B e-commerce solutions save for our users

Presented New Mobile and Tablet solutions to our current customers to gain the feedback

Made Iterations based on users' feedback and test results.

Results & Impact

Results:

Save USERS time on placing orders, and taking inventory to focus on their main tasks of running their facilities.

Impact:

Decreased the time it takes to place an order
Decreased the time on taking inventory
Reduced the number of errors when searching for products
Increased satisfaction rating

Lessons Learned

Built trust and stronger relationships with our customers by setting up meetings to understand their frustrations with our current solution, their goals, and their needs. Organized feedback sessions of presenting my ideas and designs
Innovations are important. That’s the core of any business life. Without innovations, you can lose your remaining customers and scare potential ones because you don't implement any new important changes by listening to your customers' needs.
The mobile solution was crucial for OrderMaestro. All our competitors developed mobile/tablet applications because our users are always on the go and don’t have a lot of time spent at their desks and don’t want to be dragged out from the main work tasks
Built stronger relationships with my OrderMaestro team by collaborating with my product manager and dev team. Also, I learned their work process which helped me to find optimal ways of delivering my work.
Grew my subject matter expertise in the product

Next Steps

Integrate machine learning to predict what a user will order, and how much of the product they will order, and aggregate everything for central administrators.
Create a centralized database of stock images that we can use for all items which are not provided by distribution centers and also across all iTN suite applications
Conduct the usability studies of the desktop version to understand the pain points of the current workflow and see the gaps
Redesign the desktop version of OrderMaestro