Brad Sarro | Dine

Goal

Automated dine-in payments to reduce restaurant service efforts and expand on digital convenience opportunities for patrons.

Role

As a Design Lead, I drove our digital product strategy across concept discovery, feature ideation, and MVP development support.

Outcome

Dine is a product that gives restaurants the ability for patron-first digital conveniences without drowning from hefty service fees.

Competitive Analysis

Diving into product reviews, I discovered many restaurants suffer from hefty service fees and long payment processing times across popular digital ordering tools.

To innovate in this space, my effort was focused on blending the complex spectrum of in-person dining with the convenience modern technology offers.

Interviews To Personas

Initial research lead to proto-personas that were filled with assumptions. Restaurant owner interviews helped refine our assumptions into core insights.

Conversations are the best way to gain a deeper understanding of user needs and can establish a trusted relationship between future customers.

Low-fi

My quickly made user flow helped spark cross-functional buy in early and move Dine into low fidelity concepts.

Low fidelity deliverables expanded on meaningful implementation discussions and a united V1 vision.

The Dine On Solution

After starting a Dine session, users select and add items to their order, send these orders to the kitchen, and are then directed back on the menu to continue an ordering loop.

Each item sent to the kitchen is added to the user's tab. This "Live Tab" provides a clean way for restaurants to navigate real world service scenarios such as upsells, patron discounts, and breakage.

When Dine users are finished, they simply leave the restaurant and the server closes out their tab. As the tab is closed, our user receives a notification that their payment was processed.

Tipping For Service

In the 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.

Instead of forcing users into repeated tipping prompts that would dull the restaurant experience, I advocated for a single prompt after services are experienced. This was implemented in the "payment processed" notification, allowing gratuity to come from a place of service received instead of a preemptive payment.

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

As a designer, I always look for low-hanging fruit to enhance a user experience. My ideas for Dine were small in effort but greatly reduced common social stressors.

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