Mixbowl is a white-label online ordering platform for restaurants. It allows consumers to place orders directly on a restaurant's website instead of a 3rd party app.
Its business grew tremendously during the pandemic. With new restaurants signing up and new consumers ordering daily, it became clear that our menu design needed a facelift.
I jumped onboard as a freelance designer to redesign the menu experience which resulted in larger basket sizes and more checkouts.
OUTCOME
In one month, we saw:
THE PROBLEM
Data showed us that a good chunk of users browse a restaurant's menu but hardly ever add anything to their cart - let alone checkout. We set off to investigate.
UNDERSTAND
The menu is the most interacted screen. It's a critical touchpoint for the consumer. Looking at our data, we found some interesting things.
USER INTERVIEWS
I chatted with four Mixbowl users to get their thoughts on the current menu.
Three pieces of feedback that helped me as I went through my designs:
IDEATION
Using these learnings, I began sketching out six different layouts and ideas.
Together with my team, we discussed pros and cons of each. These explorations (along with our user interviews) helped develop our three guiding principles for the menu:
HI-FI DESIGNS
C3 and C6 seemed the most promising so I fleshed them out more.
Restaurant admins actually have the ability to add menu item photos and descriptions. However, we never displayed that data on the customer-facing side.
So, to provide more specific information and to get customers excited about ordering, I thought it'd be a a good idea to pull that data in if we have it.
USABILITY TESTING
Bringing these to users again, I learned three important things:
REFINEMENTS
I made refinements and we shipped a hybrid model that used both top-level horizontal tab anchors and the menu category icon. This ensured more flexibility in the interface.
LAUNCH
We launched the new menu experience in a few stores and checked off our guiding principles.
OUTCOME
In one month, we saw:
DESIGN SPECS
I documented the key page flow and different component states.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In a two-sided marketplace, it's important to know how one experience can affect both parties. It was critical for me to get feedback from both users and constantly empathize for the two personas.
FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS
While I was only brought on to redesign the menu, these were other problems I was thinking about that would lead to a better performing menu design.
These were out of scope for my line of work at the time but i'd love to explore these if I were brought on again.
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