WAIT STAFF EXERCISE
(REQUESTED BY GOOGLE AS A TAKE-HOME DESIGN EXERCISE)

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PROBLEM DEFINITION

While there are many ways to rate and review restaurants, these are not focused on evaluating individuals servers. Design an experience where diners can submit positive comments and constructive suggestions for the wait staff, and servers can use this feedback to both improve and help to secure new employment.

UNDERSTANDING THE GOAL

Building this product will have the below value propositions:

• Enables diners to provide feedback to the wait-staff and voice their opinion
• ​Wait-staff can use the feedback to improve performance at work
• Wait-staff can use the feedback to secure new employment
• Enables restaurant managers to evaluate their current staff
• Can be used by restaurant managers to search for capable staff

WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?

USER RESEARCH AND USER STORIES

In order to understand the different users needs, I did some research to better understand the needs of each user:

• Talking to diners like myself most of them said that they are more likely to give feedback at the restaurant after paying the bill. The chances of them giving feedback decreases after they leave the location of service.
  
• Diners are most likely to give feedback if they were annoyed with the service or they were impressed with it. These two emotions can help trigger the diner to give a constructive feedback when receiving a not so good service and give a positive comment when receiving a good service.
  
• Some diners expressed their annoyance with long surveys, they want something quick. They don’t want to spend a lot of timing giving the feedback.
  
• Some waiters and waitresses voiced concern about spam reviews.
  

Based on the research, I was able to conclude that the feedback form/request has to be offered to the diner at the restaurant maybe after paying the bill. The feedback should be short and on spot, focusing on the areas that could benefit the wait-staff. Making sure that feedback can’t be submitted randomly by users is important. It has to be from a verified source.

WHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS?

A.Device on table. This can be a tablet placed on the table, the diner can leave feedback during service or before leaving.
B.Feedback via message. The diner can be sent a message prompting him to fill out the feedback online.
C.Feedback via app based on geolocation. The diners can log in using their device and check in to the restaurant and pick the staff member that served them.
D.Feedback via app based on a request from the wait-staff. Wait-staff shares a link or a code with the diner to leave feedback.
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Option A seems like the most convenient solution for leaving feedback but the constraint is that the restaurant has to agree to using the product. If they do agree, it might be costly to provide a device for each table. Option B might not appeal to the diners because they have to provide their phone number. Some diners might not be comfortable doing that which means a lot of lost feedback.
Option C sounds like a good solution.However, the limitation is that the diner has to be present in the restaurant to leave the feedback. It might also trigger a lot of spam feedback from random passerbys.
Option D has a lot of potential but it requires the wait-staff to always be on top of requesting the feedback, which might be tedious.
I feel an app combining solutions from options C & D is the best route to go. Where the wait-staff can request feedback but if they do forget the user has the option to submit feedback that might require some form of approval from wait-staff.

INSIGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS

How is the wait-staff requesting feedback? Wait staff can share a link or code in the receipt. Another option could be a card ( similar to business card) that server can hand off to the diner. Bump technology could also be an option.
What are the important areas that the wait-staff is receiving feedback on? How can we push the diner to give constructive feedback?  I did some research here to understand what are the top qualities in a wait staff, and I found this article extremely useful to help me understand what the UI should include. I decided to focus on these top 5 qualities :Pleasant, communicative, efficient, knowledgeable, courteous. And to ask the diner two simple questions: What did you like? How can I improve? These two questions have the potential of triggering constructive and positive feedback.
How can the app help the wait-staff improve their service? Beside collecting the feedback and showing it to the user, the app could leverage data and machine learning to suggest ways of improving.
What if the diner already reviewed the wait-staff in a previous visit? I thought about this for a while and decided that each visit is unique and hence the feedback is unique. The diner will not necessarily have the same input for the same person on another visit.

DEFINING THE USER TASKS AND MAPPING OUT THE JOURNEY

FLOW DIAGRAM (PLEASE CLICK TO EXPAND)

DESIGNING THE APP

Based on the research and user needs, I laid out the general flow for each user group on the device. For this exercise, I decided to focus on the wait-staff journey.

Once the wait-staff logs in the app, he/she can navigate between 3 main screens from the home page:
Overview: provides the wait-staff with a summary of his/her overall score and some recommendations based on ratings and feedbacks from customers. These recommendations are generated from our system by machine learning and leveraging data.
Recent feedback: Shows the user the most recent feedbacks the got from customers. The user has the option on clicking and exploring each unique feedback.
Waiting approval: These are the feedbacks that were submitted by diners without a code through geolocation. The wait-staff in this case has the option of approving or discarding these feedbacks. Approved one are submitted to his profile and discarded ones are deleted.

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Feedback screen from a diner without a code vs a diner with code.

The profile page provides a summary of the wait-staff's score, feedbacks received, rating in the top 5 criteria chosen based on the article mentioned above, and what did the customers like? and what can I improve? The wait staff can access each criteria and see how it has changed through out this week, this month, this year along with suggestions on how to improve it. 

Understanding how the overall score (average of all criteria ratings) is changing is valuable for picking up patterns and working on them. E.g If wait-staff is getting a low score on Mondays, being aware of it might help him/her work on improving it. 

Based on the above wireframes, I went ahead and designed some high-fidelity prototypes of the app on an Android device. 

REFLECTING ON WHAT I HAVE DONE

What are some constraints? Early in this exercise, it was clear to me how important it is to create a product that the wait-staff would be excited and motivated to use. A lot of problems with the current reviewing apps (such as yelp) is that the businesses feel that they are being bullied by customers. It was important to be empathetic to the wait-staff's needs and feelings. Setting the below constraints helped me achieve that:
Login in/Sign up: I could have allowed the diner to submit a feedback anonymously but that would have lead to random feedbacks submitted by random people. Pushing the user to sign up allowed the wait-staff to see who was giving the feedback and reassured them that the product is only collecting feedback from verified users. 
Approve/discard: This feature was necessary for the experience because it gave the wait-staff control over feedbacks submitted without his/her request. Yes, there is a chance the waiter might discard feedbacks that were from diners he served but that's up to his/her conscious. To create this sense of security and comfort with using the product, the wait-staff had to have control over feedback submitted without request.  
Feedback form: The feedback form is very short and consisted of the top five criteria that characterized a good wait-staff and two short written reviews on "What did you like?" and "How can I Improve?" The reason I made it very specific and not just a general comment box like Yelp is because I wanted the feedback to be constructive rather than random.

What's next? While designing the product, a lot of other questions/thoughts presented themselves. Investigating the below would be a good next step:

• Do we want to allow wait-staff to access each other’s feedback? Do we want to show the wait-staff how they compare with one another?  This could be exciting because it introduces an element of competition and it could act as an incentive for the wait-staff to up their game.
• What are some incentives for the diner to leave feedback? One thing the app can offer is discounts. This can be done by working along with the restaurant manager's. Coupons or discounts can be offered to diners who give feedback to their staff. This could be a good incentive for the diner and it could also be good for the business, because diners receiving coupons are more likely to return to the restaurant.
• Another thing that I didn’t investigate enough in the design process is when the waiter is working in several restaurants. I did include a location of the service in each form but I feel I could have spent more time designing for this scenario. 
• While deciding on the feedback criteria, I based my research on online articles. It would be useful to validate this with wait-staff. Conducting more user research and talking to them might help steer the app in the right direction.
• I didn’t focus much on the diners’ experience after giving the feedback, whether we should allow them to view the feedbacks they have given? Should we give them access to all the wait-staff ratings around them?
• I didn't do a thorough competitor analysis to see what is there in the market. This could be useful to see where the product stands amongst competition.
• I didn’t investigate how the desktop experience would look like. I started with an app design because it is more convenient for the diner and wait-staff. The restaurant manager might prefer a desktop experience, but I have to do more research to validate that.
• Validating the design through user testing.

Thank you for taking the time to read my design proposal!