a kitchen management resource for fast-casual and traditional restaurant spaces.
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A Case Study
Effica is a tablet application for restaurant prep management that provides a single source of truth for kitchen management and staff, enabling efficient communication, consistent product and a positive customer experience in the restaurant space.
Select headings below to navigate case study.
A high level overview is shown here before diving into the details. The application has 4 dashboards that can be accessed by the bottom navigation bar. This structure saves steps and time for all kitchen functions.
The prep team is most challenged with managing their time effectively because of the lack of reliable communication and organization within the kitchen stations, and among shifts as day and night staff rotate. If we can solve this problem, it would impact the bottom line and the guest experience positively by enabling an efficient line of communication and consistent product. It would also benefit our business because it would minimize waste, production steps, and human error that impact the kitchen teams' ability to focus on the guest experience.
Behaviors
Goals
Needs
Pain Points
My initial synthesis helped me to come up with high-level functions and features as shown in the 2x2 matrix. As I began to lay out the Journey Map it quickly started growing to become a fully functional concept.
For the Journey Map I focused on four steps: Defining Needs, Organizing the Workday, Executing the Plan, and Debriefing. Below are highlights:
Define needs: This is where I played with the idea that we could expedite "needs" by providing an automatic function that computes the "need" by taking the daily Par minus the entered On-Hand quantity.
Organize the workday: This is where I decided the priority level of items was important, and wanted to incorporate the priority automation based on 3 ranges for high, medium and low. I also saw that a bulk assignments feature would increase efficiency.
Execute the Plan: This is where I realized that a staff dashboard was necessary to execute the plan and a Recipe Card Dashboard would be a vital resource for staff members.
Debrief: Communication was a top priority, it only made sense to incorporate a Notes Dashboard for centralized communication.
With my low-fidelity wireframes I then conducted 3 moderated usability tests. Key Takeaways from the testing were to 1) add a language toggle for kitchen staff as many don’t read or write in English, 2) recipe cards should adjust based on “needs” calculated in prep list, 3) create Notes Dashboard, so there is host for the collection of notes over time, and 4) adjust interface for recipes and staff dashboard as they are too similar and may be confusing.
After creating the high-fidelity prototype I used Maze to conduct unmoderated usability tests with 4 users. My main finding was that onboarding is required for the station detail cards for first time users and the station detail card took the longest of the 5 missions. So I returned to Figma and created onboarding notifications that led you through using the application and gave you hints.
