Understanding the problem
I was the sole designer in the project team, working closely with the product owner and business analyst to see where the current process was disjointed or confusing. We interviewed the teams involved in onboarding new restaurants, gathered existing research, and gained more direct insights by visiting restaurants.
It’s clear to see the busy lifestyle and long hours restaurant owners have. The majority are using mobile devices to manage their business online. Focussed attention is scarce when orders are coming in, they are dealing with customers, staff, suppliers and issues in the restaurant. It’s quite common that English isn’t the first language.
In order to onboard the restaurants, Just Eat needs them to provide documents and details, which can become time consuming and complicated for restaurants. Frustration can be caused where the criteria for documents isn’t well understood. Restaurant owners didn’t feel the existing process was transparent, nor understand how long it would take.
Restaurants can track the progress of their application
What we did
To understand the new processes which would be implemented, and how it would affect operations and Salesforce, we spoke to those teams involved. We broke down the steps of the application to see if every requirement was absolutely necessary, where anything could be done differently or could make more sense a different way around. With involvement from our tech team, we were able to start designing and prototyping the new proposed flow.
The main features we wanted to implement for the restaurant were:
Clear communication about the company, the benefits of joining, and how Just Eat works with restaurants.
A page for the restaurant to track their progress, to give more control and visibility to the user.
Making approval criteria clear and providing better guidance on what to provide.
Clear and timely communication via emails and messages for feedback during the process, to alert them to issues, and let them link directly to their application to make amends where necessary.
We invited restaurant owners who weren’t currently using Just Eat to try our prototype, to find out everything from what they thought of the brand; how they viewed the value proposition and information presented up front - through to how easily they could navigate the journey and whether they found that it catered well to their restaurant and cuisine type.
Restaurant owners upload photos and documents from their device
We designed an application that the operational teams would use to review the information and manage the documents received. Those teams were involved throughout the process and observed the research sessions with restaurants. The document approval process would link to the user’s dashboard, so that approvals or rejection reasons could be communicated quickly.
Internal reviewers can check restaurants’ documents against clear guidelines
Launch
The journey and prototypes were complete end to end and had been shared with users and teams internally. The bulk of the work from there was in achieving accuracy and clear communication in all areas. I worked with marketing and with copy to craft our messages, and gave extra consideration to icons, statuses and feedback for the user. There was a lot of input to take onboard as the process affected so many parts of the business, but we were able to refine and get our applications in good place to launch.