Menu Match

Prompt: What does your favorite restaurant look like in a post-pandemic world?

While the restaurant industry is ever-changing and constantly evolving to meet the next greatest trend and cuisine craze, most hope to also achieve, maintain, and even exceed the customer service and experience expectation. Personal touches focused on the comfort, needs, and preferences of customers create standout experiences, adding to the overall customer encounter. Our team set out to design elevated dining options focused on ordering alternatives for customers who struggle with challenges such as dietary restrictions and decision fatigue. As we implemented and tested our design, our team concluded that this enhancement should be an additional support when ordering and not an exclusive choice for those customers who may struggle to adapt to new concepts and technologies.

Research

Surveying - - Ethnography - - Competitive Research - - Interviews - - Journey Mapping

2x2 Matrix Competitive Analysis

An overview of different ordering and payment systems to help us identify openings in the restaurant industry.

Important Survey Analysis

A series of results accumulated from over 300 survey results to inform future directions.

Journey Map

A map of the customer’s time in a restaurant from three different stakeholders’ perspectives: Customer, Employee, and Management.

Key Takeaways

Key Takeaway 1

Users enjoy going to restaurants for the social aspects, so the experience should enhance conversation and the group experience.

Key Takeaway 2

Users like ordering from human waiters over other methods and find the human interaction comforting, so it should not be overshadowed by technology.

Key Takeaway 3

Users go to a restaurant to relax and be waited on, so the restaurant environment should revolve around the user and how each aspect of their experience affects them.

Aspirational Journey Map

A map of how we want our final product to affect the customer along their restaurant journey.

Initial Concepts

Description: The co-annotated menu concept includes a touchscreen at each seat of a dining table, displaying only the full menu. Users can mark up the menu, and the annotations will appear on everyone’s screen.
What it addresses: This idea facilitates discussions about the menu and helps people make menu decisions through the use of notes, alleviating some of the stress associated with searching through and menu and sorting through potential choices solely inside one’s mind.
Description: For the freestyle choice bar concept, the bar would ea an interactive screen that gives the customer options of what flavor notes they want in their drink. Once the customer has made their selections, the machine sends the bartender a customized drink order tailored to those flavors.
What it addresses: This idea incorporates personalization of the menu experience, which we identified as an area of opportunity and improvement. Furthermore, it gives the customer a fully customized order that was made specifically with their needs and wants in mind.
Description: The cooking mini-game order concept includes a touchscreen table. After the customer orders their food, they play a mini-game on this table while they wait for their meal to arrive. This mini-game involves ‘cooking’ the dish that they ordered (think Cooking Mama).
What it addresses: This idea addresses the issue of food waiting times by engaging the customer in a form of interactive entertainment. The intent is to turn this common pain point of the customer journey into an opportunity to create a positive and memorable experience.
Description: The co-annotated menu concept includes a touchscreen at each seat of a dining table, displaying only the full menu. Users can mark up the menu, and the annotations will appear on everyone’s screen.
What it addresses: This idea facilitates discussions about the menu and helps people make menu decisions through the use of notes, alleviating some of the stress associated with searching through and menu and sorting through potential choices solely inside one’s mind.
Description: This concept is based around the restaurant knowing who you are because you tell them. You would begin by signing as simply as possible, as if the restaurant knows you and is greeting you as you walk in. This would allow you access to you profile which could contain different types of information such as the notes of previous trips you made, different personalized suggestions, other reviews of meals, etc.
What it addresses: This could assist in many facets such as Order Confidence, Relatability to the Restaurant, and Ensuring the correct meal will be delivered. By having a system that gets to know you more and more as you attend, you create a connection of trust and guests more willing to trust it.
Description: In the flavor profile quiz concept, when a customer is seated, they are handed a quiz to ask what types of food they are in the mood for. The waiter will use the results of the customer’s quiz to bring them a personalized menu.
What it addresses: This idea allows for the personalization of the menu experience through the use of physical artifacts instead of screens (which we found through our research as a potential means of preventing technology from becoming a detriment in the customer and server journeys).
Description: This is a concept that can’t stand on its own, but it creates a solution based around how we can use the physical space of the restaurant to complete a task. When asking in our survey, many people enjoyed being waited on, but there is also a large population that had some hang ups of some fashion. There would be multiple sections of a restaurant all separated by how much technology can be involved. If you want a fully technology based restaurant experience, you would go to the blue section and moving counterclockwise makes it less and less technology oriented.
What it addresses: This solution would benefit each customer by allowing them to choose what experience would satisfy them most. By giving multiple avenue choices and experience, we can cater to a younger group who may prefer technology and seniors who may prefer face-to-face interactions..
Description: The customer begins by entering the restaurant at the ‘START’ position. From there, they will choose between a series of doors that are labeled with a flavor profile like ‘SPICY’ versus ‘MILD’ or ‘SALTY’ versus ‘SWEET’. As they select the doors that they walk through, they are choosing the dish that they will be served once they reach the final destination (where they will be seated and presented their food).
What it addresses: This idea addresses the issue of decision fatigue and information overload that may occur when presented with a traditional, multi-page menu. With this design, the customer only has to choose between a couple of options at a time, making the process more manageable and personalized to their tastes. Finally, it gives the customer a novel and immersive ordering experience that they likely have not had before.

Chosen Concept

Rapid Lo-Fi Modeling - - Medium Fidelity Modeling

Chosen Concept First Iteration

Chosen Concept First Iteration Walk Through

Hero Shot

A fully digital menu that uses hand touch input, the end of silverwear as a pen, and a cup as a dial.
First Interaction

As the guest is seated, the hostess is able to activate the table and each guest will have access to the digital menu.
Login

To enhance the connection between the restaurant and the guest, they are able to login to retrieve their previous history including previous meals ordered and notes taken about them.
Physical Interactions

Guests are able to use their physical objects to set the flavor profiles they want. For example, by placing the water cup on the digital dial, they are able to toggle between different tastes such as salty, sweet, and umami and set the level that they are looking for in a meal. This will begin to eliminate some of the items on the menu if they don’t fit their selections.
Bookmark

To help you remember you want to look at something or go back to it at any time, guests can bookmark an item and it will appear next to the main menu as a reminder—no matter how you change your flavor profiles. Above this area, there is also a place to take notes, if needed.
Share

Guests are also able to show the rest of their group something on their menu by sliding the menu along the table.
Order

Finally, the guest orders with their waiter to ensure order accuracy and exact customization. Once the order is finalized, the screens disappear unless they are called again.

User Testing

Surveying - - Wizard of Oz Testing - - Mockup Design

List of Tasks to Complete in Testing

The administrator read instructions from a script and the participant was led through several different tasks using the interface. They were observed during this time and notes were taken on their confidence, response, and any deviations from the expected reaction.

Active User Testing

Utilizing an Epson EB-485Wi to project light onto a physical paper menu affixed to a table, a laptop was connected to the projector via an HDMI cable so the test proctor could change the highlighted content as the user interacted with the menu, to mimic our desired interface.

Testing Survey Results

Participants took a survey on how they recognize and categorize flavors. We later analyzed their responses to get a baseline of how the general public perceives flavor.

Top Flavor Profiles (Unprompted):

Sweet, Salty, Spicy

Top 5 Flavor Profiles (Prompted):

Sweet, Salty, Creamy, Spicy, Fresh

Multiple mentions of textural & temperature words

Warm and Crunchy

Decision Fatigue & Information Overload

Users prefer to rate dishes on a Likert scale than guessing a dishes ranking.

Prompted Flavor Profile Results

Key Takeaways

Key Takeaway 1

Lighting could be an issue for users. The area must be dark enough to see projected light.

Key Takeaway 2

Users wanted to use their hands more than using other tools like silverware or cups to interact with the UI.

Key Takeaway 3

Users found some of the cues and signifiers insufficient. Some potential features to add would be micro-animations and multiple places for similar actions.

Final Concept

3D Modeling - - Rendering - - Videography - - Graphic Design - - Technology Research

Menu Match is an interactive menu projector system that gives restaurant-goers the ability to filter and customize their menu. Using finger touches on a physical menu, users can check off dietary restrictions and adjust sliding scales for different flavor profiles (i.e. savory, salty, sweet, spicy, fresh), which will subsequently narrow down menu choices by highlighting them. These sliding scales can be adjusted to have minimum and maximum percentages of flavors.