Project duration: 2 years 1 month
Company: Startup
Position: Full-Time Contract
COMPANY
MANAGEMENT SOLUTION
Aptito is a company specializing in improving business management solutions for the restaurant industry. By utilizing a cloud-based point of sales and enhancing customer experience it provides restaurant owners with the flexibility to manage their business remotely.
OBJECTIVES
IMPROVE PROCESS
According to research, many business owners are interested in improving the restaurant’s table turnover rate, increase sales, lower labor costs, and boost customer satisfaction. They are searching for a smart software solution that would help to grow their business.
GOALS
INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY
FOR BUSINESS OWNERS analyze management process pain points and implement necessary automatization.
FOR PRODUCT USERS identify process gaps in the food ordering chain and improve the customer experience.
I worked as Sr. Product Designer in an agile team of UX/UI designers, engineers, and product owners.
During the Sprint Planning meetings, we discuss the tasks that should be accomplished within the Sprint and add them to the board as Jira Cards. The developers still track work in Jira, while the Product Owner has a better solution to keep everybody on the same page by using Jira Cards in Miro. Prior to the daily sync, everyone updated the status of daily tasks in Jira, so it automatically becomes visible on the Miro board.
Our goal was to determine what restaurant owners like and dislike about current POS products they used and collect suggestive data about the management process.
We highlighted the assumptions why restaurants with the conventional management system would find
Cloud POS to be a more attractive option to switch to.
We visited local restaurants to learn about restaurant management hardware, the ordering process and attended for POS hardware presentations.
and identified the average timeline for each operation.
waiters and POS during the food ordering process.
By exploring various case studies and competitor companies, we’ve reviewed different aspects of the traditional menus vs digital such as typography, human-computer interaction, usability, and material design.
We performed the a/b testing via an online platform userlytics.com to collect verbal and non-verbal contextual insights about the menu usability. The Userlytics Testing platform allowed us to run any combination of moderated or unmoderated user experience usability tests. We used demographic filters as well as set up a custom screener to bring own participants. We defined the tasks users need to complete either app or prototype to
receive qualitative and quantitative data.
We constantly improved the digital menu design by collaborating with the restaurant’s management and product stakeholders. We worked with the developer’s team on and content management system (CMS) to create a simple and intuitive interface for restaurant management and non-technical users.
We adopted a library of pre-designed background templates, which helped restaurants customize the menu’s look and feel, including uploading its brandings such as logos, background, and changing font styles.
We’ve exhibited the demo at the annual conference of restaurants. The goal was to collect feedback from our target audience to improve the POS application’s functionality and usability. We’ve collected some positive and negative reviews, which later helped us improve the system.
We’ve created a library of unique components and symbols that would make it easier to simulate the restaurant’s floor plan layout, kitchen location, bar, windows, floor levels, outside space, etc.
What I’ve learned
The complexity and versatility of the project allowed me to learn and understand, in-depth, the functionality of the restaurant’s POS systems and business in general. I also had a unique opportunity to study the variations of different platforms and find the best design solutions for their interaction as well as test them in a working environment. Due to this fact, the development of this project took place in the context of frequent strategic changes associated with project planning and financing. Many decisions went under an additional revision, which introduced some implementation problems.
In particular, I considered sufficient prioritization of my weak links in this project tasks that entailed unnecessary delays, especially at the beginning phase of the project. Over time, I realized that active communication between me, developers, and management accelerated the process of implementation.
After over three years of development, and many tests conducted during the implementation, the Aptito POS (beta) was set up into the ten restaurants. By now, the Aptito POS system is widely used in the USA and outside the country. Aptito Platform was awarded as Most Innovative Product by the fourth annual Best in Biz Awards.
