Servli Onboarding
COMPANY
Servli
date
2017
ROLE
Product Design
EXPERTISE
Onboarding tutorial flow and mockups
IMPACT
Established a single taxonomy for a legacy system of organizing food supplies that varied significantly across vendors.Successful rounds of user-testing in the field showing time on task to be faster and more efficient than old methods.
A sample of Servli's onboarding screens
The Challenge: Beat the clipboard and excel sheets
Assist Servli users in their first experience of using the app to track kitchen inventory, manage suppliers, and create orders. The crux of this user experience problem was overcoming the learning curve of a new interface. Most restaurants and chefs managed inventory with an ad-hoc mix clipboards, excel sheets, and hand-written notes. Bringing everything under one app was new.
We were asking the user to learn some slightly new patterns for familiar tasks.
Get in the kitchen
After significant time investment in the field with restaurant owners and kitchen managers we were able to create a mobile app experience that was usable in busy kitchens managing suppliers with a wide variety of ordering methods, non-standard nomenclature, and variable pricing and packaging approaches.
I went through several iterations of taxonomy designs until landing on one that had simple language and a clear perspective on information architecture. This was confirmed through a series of tests with the target audience and running audits against all available forms of restaurant supplier invoices.
Once our taxonomy was settled, I collaborated with my design colleagues on a user flow and a pattern library to facilitate inventory, ordering and supplier management. This again was tested thoroughly in the field with our target audience.
Learn by doing
I adapted our pattern library, based on google's material design system, to create a guided onboarding experience. My approach was to guide the user through setting up a real supplier, adding and counting real inventory items, and creating their first order. With a complex set of flows using new patterns it's important to have a lightweight onboarding experience to increase the likelihood of users having their first A-ha moment and using the app long-term.
Results
The early versions of the app tested well with our beta user group. Unfortunately, as we were readying the rest of the platform and app for release the plug was pulled on the entire project by the CEO. He reallocated our team to work on reviving the floundering Foodservicerewards.com platform and program.
The good news is that all the knowledge that came out of the field research and creating a standardized structure for ingesting inventory manifests was not lost. That knowledge carried through to several projects undertaken on the FoodService Rewards project.
