Brad Sarro | Dine

Goal

Improve restaurant service efforts by expanding on a patron's natural digital convenience for automated dine-in seating, ordering, and POS processing.

Role

As a Design Lead, I spearheaded the digital product strategy across concept discovery, feature ideation, and MVP development trade-offs.

Outcome

Dine is a product that gives restaurant patrons the ability to tailor their table-side service without drowning in hefty service fees or a toxic tipping culture.

Competitive Analysis

Diving into product reviews for direct and indirect competitors, I discovered many buyers suffer from hefty service fees, forced hardware subscription rentals, and painfully long payment processing times.

This helped show the gaps for innovation and was a starting point for my collaboration with R&D. It was important we proofed technical limitations so we wouldn't risk building a partial solution that doesn't meet the complex spectrum of scenarios seen with in-person dining.

Interviews To Personas

Proto-personas were drafted from aggregated service reviews, but to gain a deeper understanding I interviewed several restaurant owners and staff. These conversations helped to add real-world contrast to earlier assumptions.

Low-fi

Low fidelity deliverables helped to quickly iterate and expand on ideas for meaningful implementation discussions.

These quickly made user flows helped spark cross-functional buy in early and outlined the V1 vision.

The Dine On Solution

When starting a Dine session, patrons add items to their order, send the order to the kitchen, and placed back on the menu to promote an easy ordering loop.

Each item sent to the kitchen is added to the patron's tab. The "Live Tab" provides a clean way for restaurants to adapt and accommodate common service scenarios (e.g. upsells, discounts, breakage, etc...).

When a patron is finished, they simply leave the restaurant and a server closes out the tab at their convenience. A push-notification gives our patron transparency of the processed payment.

Tipping For Service

In the United States, predatory tipping culture is a growing frustration among shoppers. This is a problem I wanted to find a better approach to and preserve the tipping process where it makes the most sense.

Rather than forcing patrons through repeated tipping prompts, I advocated for a single prompt after service was fully experienced.

Placing it in the close-out notification shifts gratuity from a preemptive percentage or default charge to a choice based on the service received.

Rolling Out The Shiny Experience

Handoff That Works

Tossing things over the fence never gets built as intended. Handoff needs clarity via documentation and ongoing support as development picks up features to be made.

I believe designers need to remain collaboratively involved throughout the development lifecycle. Supporting my team through uncertainty brings clarity to implementation where we nail the desired experience - the first time.

Designing A Little Extra Delight

I am always look for low-hanging fruit to enhance or improve an experience. One seemed small in effort but greatly reduced common social stressors.

The Hand button, allows users to notify their server for assistance without awkwardly trying to wave down their attention from across the restaurant.