Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Google Design Challenge
“While there are many ways to rate and review restaurants, these are not focused on evaluating individuals servers. Design an experience where diners can submit positive comments and constructive suggestions for the wait staff, and servers can use this feedback to both improve and help to secure new employment. Provide a high-level flow, supporting wire frames, and a high-fidelity mock.”
I selected this exercise because it felt like one where I could use some of my skills orchestrating an experience across multiple touchpoints.
Tools
Paper & sharpie, Sketch, Unsplash, Coolors, Font Pair & Google Fonts, Squarespace
Here's how I approached it:
Keep work low-fidelity as long as possible for the sake of speed
Withhold judgement and go for quantity when ideating for idea quality.
Understand and develop insights
First things first: What do I already know? What are my questions?
Concept mapping is an activity I like to do solo to identify actors, props, stages, and supporting tech in the service.
The questions I set out to answer.
Activities I did:
- Desk research. Browsed the web and read articles about the restaurant industry.
- Reflected on past experience. I used to be a server and a barista in college. I'm a frequent diner now.
- Informal interviews. Spoke with 2 friends who are diners now.
- Went to brunch. this activity was a good excuse to get out to Sunday brunch with my partner. Let's call it ethnography? 😅
Insights
"Good Service" is so, so subjective
On the diner side, good service depends on a variety of things. For example, what kind of restaurant did they go to? A 2:30am trip to Waffle House carries different service expectations than a 2-Michelin star restaurant that the diner waited months for. Also, unfortunately, perception of good service is still subject to huge amounts of bias:
“Researcher observes that servers get increased tips due to unchangeable or hard-to-change factors such as age, breast size, hair color, body mass, and race, as well as seemingly arbitrary changes such as squatting and drawing happy faces. He also observes that tipping’s connection to service quality is real, but weak.”
On the flip-side, Servers develop their own unique style of service. Some servers are funny. Others are witty. Others are thoughtful. By developing styles based on their strengths, servers find what works for them. Some even develop lasting relationships with diners (which of course in-turn affects service expectations).
How might we correct for diners' bias and subjectivity, while simultaneously empowering servers to be themselves?
But there are some universal factors of good service
Two factors of good service came up in all my conversations. They were politeness and attentiveness. Attentiveness was about keeping service flowing. It meant keeping waters and drinks filled, that plates didn't sit empty too long, and that the server checked in shortly after the meal was delivered. Politeness was about the manners of the server. Servers didn't necessarily have to be friendly, but they did have to be polite. How might we capture attentiveness and politeness in our flow?
Reviewing a person feels awkward
Reviewing a restaurant is somewhat easy. It's a business whose owners are often out of sight. A server, on the other hand, is a person you've interacted with. How might we mitigate the awkwardness of reviewing a person?
There's no server school
Service skills are tribal knowledge. Effective service techniques are trained by the restaurant or learned through trial and error. Formal training processes for servers are reserved for finer establishments. How might we help servers grow?
Design Goals
- Immediacy - If this service can get servers feedback during their shift, they can immediately calibrate service. This requires a few things. First, we must convince the user to leave a review as soon as possible after their meal. Then, the feedback must make its way to the server as quickly as possible.
- Provide Guidance - Because service is so subjective and so subject to bias, the diner will need assistance to leave the most helpful feedback for the server. The server, on the other hand, will need help actioning the feedback that they receive.
- Celebrate Uniqueness - The goal of a product like this shouldn't be to create a single definition of good service that all servers adhere to. It should be to empower them to develop their own authentic style of service that builds on their strengths.
- Respect all parties - The diner may be feeling strange about reviewing a person, so it's going to be important to respect their privacy. At the same time, it's important to respect the server, and not use or encourage language that will demean them. The product needs to convey that we are setting them both up for success.
Ideation
This is one of my favorite parts of designing: ideating openly and reserving judgement for later.
This rough flow shows how information might flow between server and diner
Explorations for different channels that this service might use to convince the diner to leave a review.
The exact feedback mechanism that is used is super important. Here are 6 different ideas I came up with.
4 ideas for how servers could be notified of feedback.
Selected approach
I chose these approaches for a few reasons:
- The physical invite allows everyone at the table to leave a review.
- An feedback mechanism that uses explicit language could combat bias.
- A summary email
Risks
Of course, this approach isn't without risk. Here's a few:
- There's some friction in the transition from physical invite to website.
- Unclear how many servers have smart watches or pay attention to phone notifications during their shift.
Refining the selected concepts
At the beginning, a very high level flow demonstrates how a server's actions kick off a diner's, and vice-versa. The mixed-fidelity deliverable below explains how a physical card leads to a mobile web interaction which leads to a watch interaction.
The visuals convey authority and classic service
The food imagery communicates a mastery of the food space, demonstrated by artful plating and the handling of uncommon ingredients. This lends the service authority, which can be used to guide diners through the review process and servers through advice on how to improve.
"How did I do?" card
The white card evokes a clean white tablecloth, a classic symbol of service. This product is all about helping servers level-up their service, and using artifacts of good service shows that we know what that means.
Reflection
This was fun! I kind of got into a groove, but didn't want to go too far for fear of overdoing it. I spent approximately 12 hours on this assignment. Here's what I'd like to do if I had more time:
- Figure out how (or if?) this thing makes money. A service like this has to sustain itself somehow.
- Show companion interfaces. A companion smartphone app to the server watch app could show an expanded view of the summary and every individual review.
- Show onboarding and setup. This is a key part of the flow I didn't get around to.
- Dig into integrations. A service like this could only benefit from integrations with review sites like Yelp, Foursquare, or Zagat
- Explore a report card interface that could be used to find new employment. I'd imagine this would be web-based, or perhaps an easily-printable and exportable PDF that could be handed in with a physical job application.
- Solve some edge cases. For example, what if a server works at multiple restaurants?
- Explore server education. The insight that there's no server school is a big one. How can this service help servers apply insights about their individual performance to their day-to-day behavior?
- Incentivize faster feedback from the diner. There might be ways to get servers feedback more immediately.