Timothy Wayne

UX Case Study

UX Research & Design at Delaget

Design of the Delaget Platform Dashboard. Clickable prototype

Design of Delaget Platform Dashboard, the result of UX Research, observations in interviews, user feedback and prototyping. This is a polished design, let's look at the process, meetings and the UX practices that got us here...

About Delaget

Delaget is a restaurant reporting and analytics company. Providing quick serve restaurants SaaS products that allow them to monitor core restaurant metrics, to identify risk, sales numbers and opportunities for operational improvements.

The Challenge

Users of Delaget reporting have expressed interest in creating their own custom reports. Currently, they must contact Delaget to have any changes made to the reports.

Stakeholder Vision

I aligned with stakeholders to understand the vision for a Business Intelligence (BI) product. I wanted to get closer to what users were trying to accomplish. What are their motivations? What are they trying to accomplish by using Delaget reporting? I started my UX Research there, with users outside the Delaget building to learn more about their use cases and getting a better picture of the personas who would use this product.

UX Research

In the UX Research, I interviewed users and observed how they used reporting, in order to add context and insight into the process of designing the user experience. We did this through a variety of techniques, tools and methods to reach conclusions, uncover pain-points, document use cases to see overlaps in user needs, add to our personas thereby revealing valuable information which informs the design process. User research included... It is important to have visibility into the user research by the development team. I sit with the development team and am part of their weekly meetings. I also include them in the user research and invite them to user sessions, publish video recordings of the session and have meetings to collaborate on what we should test first as we move towards the vision one step at a time. Looking to make progress on the project with user feedback and leaving room to iterate and learn as we go.

Synthesizing user feedback

As we moved through meeting with users, understanding their motivation, current pain-points with reporting, document use cases and adding to our personas, we started to identify the needs and prioritize them. Yes, users are telling us and showing us how they wanted a BI tool but there was also something else I was observing in the discovery sessions. Users were taking the reporting from Delaget and creating a spreadsheet with the metrics. A spreadsheet they would aggregate by their restaurant management levels:

• - Home office
• - Region Manager
• - Area Manager
• - Restaurant Manager

They would send out the spreadsheet with core restaurant metrics and indicate where things were doing well (green color), where things were starting to go off course (yellow color) and where things were over a threshold and needed attention (red color). As I documented the research, I saw this pattern over and over again. I invite the VP of Product to the discovery sessions and keep him in the loop with the documentation as well as having conversation with him. I told him about this observation and what I thought it meant.

Delaget has an opportunity here to save our users hours each week they spend on collecting data out of Delaget, creating spreadsheets and sending them out to their users. Delaget already has this data, has a few products currently already aggregating some of this information. What if, based on what we are seeing users doing, change how we organize information in our products? What if, we create a single product platform that would allow us to turn on and off features users were looking for? Instead of the silos of information we have in multiple products. Which is also creating duplication of development effort to maintain these separate products. What if we created a product platform that aggregated the core metrics we see being put in these spreadsheets and put them on a dashboard?

I shared this sketch idea of the Delaget Platform:


He loved it! He was really excited about the idea. As we continued to do research and work on this idea, he had me present the idea as a long-term vision to the senior team. Their feedback was supportive! We are currently working on how we can break the project down into testable features.

Yet, I am getting ahead of myself, I sketched out lo-fi dashboards that conveyed this idea and took them back to users.

Lo-Fi Prototypes

The responses were overwhelmingly positive to the pencil sketched dashboard prototypes. There was one piece of the dashboard concepts that wasn't well received, the bonus tracker. It surprised us that various clients we worked with didn't think we should put this on the dashboard. Yet, it was helpful to learn that before we invested development time building it. We were able to surface the concerns with a sketch drawing.

Lo-fi pencil sketch prototypes

Pretty much all the things I send out daily resides right here on this one page.
(I pull them for 4 or 5 places now.)
Gary F - TBCTI

From a dashboard, I am like what I am seeing, you are focusing on the big two Labor and Food Cost.
On a daily basis, I can see how that is trending.
Good impression so far.
I like the ideation on this.
Jason H - WHG

You are putting it all on one page, giving us one place to go to.
Mobile is good for Area Managers.
Max - BFI

Clickable Prototype

With positive feedback to the lo-fi prototypes we continue to iterate the ideas and get user feedback. I started working on a hi-fi clickable prototype that we could use to continue to share the idea with users and internal stakeholders.

Design of the Delaget Platform Dashboard. Clickable prototype

Validate

Next we will look to test, validate, iterate and repeat as we look to minimize risk in moving forward.

Test prototype
Iterate
Repeat