Beggars is an Italian restaurant with over two dozen locations across Illinois and Indiana. Beggars offers carry out and dine in options including pizza, pasta, appetizers, salads and sandwiches, although they are best known for their pizza.

High-Level Design Objective: Redesign the

My role: Redesign the current flow to solve frustrations and improve user experience.

Duration: 7 weeks

The problem area

While Beggars had a strong, loyal base of customers already, they noticed that there was a significant group of people that would visit their site but leave without starting an order. They, then, came to us to understand why it was happening and how we could solve it.

Our focus was on the largest audience making up that group of visitors: millennials. Our next step was then to dive more into user interviews, analytics and secondary research to understand user behavior and come up with a solution that would help bridge the gap and lead to more conversions.

Understanding current constraints

While speaking with them, we found out that they had a contract in place for their current checkout process software and that we wouldn't be able to make any changes to it. Although we knew how valuable and important a client's checkout process is for a user experience, we knew that a large majority of our intended audience was leaving the site before they even clicked 'Order', so we focused on making an impact in that part of the process.

Diving deeper into research

We started the project by speaking with the client to understand their goals and expectations, as well as to understand the previous research they had conducted. Some important methods we used in this case were user interviews, industry research and competitive analysis. We worked alongside our research team to understand the pain points of our audience and why they were leaving the site prematurely.

Interviews and analytics showed that many had arrived to the website from seeing promotional materials or ads, but they didn't know much about Beggars. In fact, many of them had never ordered from Beggars before and felt that the site wasn’t enticing. They then ended up dropping off to order from a pizza competitor that they were already familiar with and liked.

Since we knew the current site wasn't capturing their attention, we tried to gather more information about what does to find out what motivates them to order from a new restaurant. The main things that came up were delicious photos of food, uniqueness, and reviews, closely followed by location. While we knew we couldn't do much regarding the reviews or locations, we knew we could look more into the food images and the uniqueness factor.

“I buy with my eyes. If something looks delicious, I am much more likely to get it.”

Our Solution

From doing competitive research, we also saw that Menus and Menu pages across restaurants and shops were highly utilized. It was also a feature that our customers mentioned using when exploring new restaurants during their consideration phase. Based on this knowledge, we decided to go with Menu and Menu pages that would shows users the delicious food items available at Beggars, helping influence their decision.

Based on this knowledge, I started sketching and then designing low fidelity wireframes for the Homepage, the Menu and the Menu pages.

I also made sure that users would have a fast and efficient way to start an order from the menu pages, which was done by adding a floating button that would say ‘Start Your Order’. This would help with conversions and creating set pathways to move the user through the funnel.

Communicating with Stakeholders

When we communicated our solution to the stakeholders, we realized that the menu was different across all 24 franchises. Some of the stores had created their own items while some others had removed other items.

Beggars would have to speak to more than 24 stores about the intended design solution in order for everyone to be aligned as far as what food items they were going to show. We, of course, let them know to make sure to include items that were the most popular and profitable.

After further discussions, we also decided to add copy to let the user know that pricing and availability was dependent on the store to make sure the customer experience wasn't compromised.

Aligning on Photography

Here will go information abaout this thing and more here.

Results

Next came the development of the prototype, which would help us test the new design with users to gain feedback.

Here is stat 2

Menu pages have an average of 25 seconds for engagement time

Reflection

Don’t need to overcomplicate or have a grandious solution, something simple, clean and clear can have a huge impact

This project was a true testament to how important human-centered design is. Working with a platform that had a high degree of complexity helped me see the frustration that products like these can have on a group of people, and how they can hinder their work. 

I also enjoyed the challenge of designing without changing things too much because I did not want to add a steep learning curve for employees. I wanted to create something that helped them achieve their goal (a quick and accurate grant confirmation) but was not a far departure from what they were used to seeing and working with.