Build a product to save food service managers' jobs endangered by outsourcing

UX Design, UI design, Prototyping, UX research, Product Design
Project Overview
  • Company:
    ‍    Intendent Pro, SaaS startup
  • Product Description:
    Meal planner webapp for polish institutions
  • Role:
    Product Designer, Single Design Lead working with Developers, Stakeholders and the clients
  • ‍Platform:
    Web application
Context
Design a disruptive product that will help food service mangers to stay competitive on the job market that demands a shift from asset managers into dietitians.

Initially the stakeholder wanted to just employ a graphic designer to create UI's. After going through a whole design thinking process she was terrified how wrong the project would've gone without user centric approach.

Empathize Phase

User Research
  • Focus groups
  • Internal workshops
  • Competitive analysis
I facilitated workshops with focus groups that included food service managers to understand the pain points of the future product users. I conducted market research to get the grip of the competition and find the unique market value.

What I’ve found at this stage:

  • Food service managers need to comply to government dietary laws as well as rising demand from parents to become more diverse with food planning
  • The vast majority of the managers do not have relevant dietary knowledge as in the past their job was more related to strict food storage management
  • There are already storage management products that offer some of the food planning solutions but those solutions are provisional addons not build with user centric design. Their processes are hard to learn. The interface is obsolete and provides low user experience.
  • Competitors customer support is slow in response and often paid to answer (consultation fee) even basic questions. Some competitors need two weeks to answer to the bug report which can take months to repair.
  • Product needs accessibility focus, especially in the readability area (AA pass). Many of the users are in the age group that experiance eyesight decline.
Intense workshops with the product team and focus group meetings allowed us to understand main user pain points and build proper information architecture for the system and also optimize user flows.

User persona

Linda
Thompson

Age
 45
Occupation
Food Manager in a Public School
Education
High School Graduate
Tech Literacy
Low
Goals
  • Comply with government dietary regulations.
  • Plan and provide nutritious meals for students.
  • Successfully adapt to the new responsibilities of meal planning.
Challenges
  • Limited Dietary Knowledge: Linda lacks expertise in dietary requirements and struggles to create meals that meet the diverse needs of students with allergies and health conditions.
  • Minimal Employer Support: Linda faces challenges due to the lack of support from her employer, which hinders her ability to implement effective solutions and access resources. Moreover, she has to fit new tasks into her current schedule.
  • Low Tech-Savvy: Linda finds it challenging to integrate technology into her role. Digital tools and patterns overwhelm her, impacting her efficiency in meal planning and adherence to regulations.
  • Financial Constraints: Linda's low-paying job adds stress to her situation, limiting her ability to explore advanced solutions or training programs to enhance her skills.
Pain Points
  • Feeling Overwhelmed: Linda feels overwhelmed by the sudden shift in responsibilities and struggles to cope with the technological aspects of her job, which is prone to be outsourced by dietitians.
  • No time: Linda has to implement new duties while conducting her current ones. This causes her to stress as there is not enough time to learn during her work. She is stressed because she doesn't know if she will be able to make it work.
  • Inadequate Resources: Limited support from her employer leaves Linda feeling isolated, with inadequate resources to address the dietary challenges she faces.
  • Financial Stress: The low pay contributes to financial stress, hindering Linda's ability to invest in dietary education  that could streamline her work.
Opportunities for Improvement
  • Simplified Technology: Develop user-friendly, intuitive technology tools tailored to Linda's low-tech literacy to assist her in meal planning and compliance with regulations.
  • Optimize workflow: Allow Linda to cover her new duties with features that speed up the process of meal planning, so it does not take too much of her time.
  • Quick start & support: Let Linda have a tool, which she can quickly test & adapt. Provide her a space where she doesn't have to search for any additional knowledge source and regulatory news.

Define phase

Problem definition
At this stage we've been ready to create main user problems to solve.
  • Users want to be able to cover the new dietitian roles without fear that their work doesn't comply with national regulations.
  • Users need an efficient way to cover additional dietary tasks, reducing the risk of taking overtime or being outsourced
  • Users need support in terms of dietary knowledge to cope with new challenges in their daily jobs.
Simple UI was beneficial for less technological users. With small development team, designs had to be also optimized for efficient delivery. We used as less components as possible, focusing on delivered value for the user.

Solution creation

Ideation & Testing
  • Figma
  • User Interviews
  • Workshops
Our team proceeded on generating ideas on how to deliver value to the users and optimize user flows to make the tool a true solution to their problems.

I've been able to spot several information architecture & user flow improvements that allowed us to drastically reduce time to create a menu. Compared to our competitors, Intendent Pro users can do it 70% faster.

Main solutions to deliver value:

  • Meal planner web application that automatically checks meal schedule compliance with the government regulations for each of the insitution type (from nursery to high school).
  • User flows and system information architecture built with the future users.
  • Multiple options to reduce user task completion time. Products, meals and meal menu's have duplication options. Meals and products can be easily edited (by creating their variants) during menu creation process. Pre-fill in several inputs.
  • Built-in databases of thousands ready to use products (used to build meals) and whole meals to speed up the creation process and add versatility. The option to add new or duplicate meals or products to create user’s additional database.
  • Built-in system guide and dietary knowledge base to provide additional support options

Refine product

A lot of our work was also spent on refining product's strategy. I have used my experience with startups to bring valuable insights about do's and don'ts.

I was an eager advocate of quickly delivering the highest value for the users and start to learn as fast as possible.

My main advices:

  • Don't enforce full commitment on a untested product - our stakeholder initially wanted only a yearly plan. I was able to show the benefits of having a monthly option. Our product was just starting and had to prove that it was good. Our work was to ensure that what we deliver is surpassing the expectations. If we can build such a product and gain trust, only then our users will start looking for the benefits of long term subscriptions (yearly plan discounts)
  • Provide a free test period - to gain early adopters and avoid potential dissatisfied early users, we needed to provide a way for the users to test the product for free. Our goal at the beginning is to optimize and learn, not to focus on gaining profits from the day 1.
  • Outcomes, not features - we had to focus on covering the most important needs from our users perspective. We have generated several features that could add additional value, but with limited resources and an untested product, we would only extend the go to market time and make it harder to properly test the core values.

Delivery

Effects
  • The product managed to achieve sustainable revenue just after the first quarter of going live. During our workshops we were able to cut vast amount of unnecessary features and user flows, initially requested by the stakeholder. It allowed Intendent Pro to greatly reduce development and maintenance costs along with benefiting it's users.
  • NPS result just after 1st quarter after go live was 71 - which is exceptionally high for digital products. It remains at this levels till today (launched in January 2022).
  • Large amount of positive reviews from the users in social media. Main praised areas: ease of use, functionality scope, clean interface. The users do not hesitate to share comments on how this product helps to ease their work. Intendent Pro has quickly become the top 1 choice in it's niche and currently is the most recommended institutional meal planner in Poland
  • Easy scaling with proper design system. With the approach to create a simple yet efficient list of system components. This allowed us also to have a strict control on any future development, which would already use optimized resources.
Using 4px grid system has made both the design & development process much faster and reliable. It's much easier to achieve visual consistency with this approach.

There's more when we meet.
Drop me a hint what your needs are.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Copyright@MAKEUX 2023

Home

About me

LinkedIn