Reinhart

A fresh solution to deliver quality ingredients to restaurants every day

PROJECT BRIEF

As one of the largest foodservice distributors in the US, Reinhart needed a mobile app to replace Tracsdirect, their kitchen management system handling sales and inventory.

ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES

UX designer involved primarily during problem discovery and definition, implementing tactic and strategic methodologies that led towards solution discovery.

OUTCOME OVERVIEW

I worked with Reinhart to reassess users needs and define the business requirements and experience strategy that paved the way for their new Tracsdirect mobile app.

Cooking up a storm

Making the case for a design discovery

In an guerrilla attempt to drive user research forward, we asked our on-site business analyst to conduct a Frequency of Use Analysis (FUA) test to 5 customers from different industries as well as 5 sales reps, our purpose was to validate the requirements and assumptions that business had made with real people.

We created paper-based kits with screenshots of common pages across the current system, the instruction was to circle the sections that they used everyday and cross out the ones they never used or visited infrequently.

Frequency of use paper-tests

Tests analysis and afterwards conversations with participants demonstrated, among other things, that what Reinhart called “customer” actually encompased distinct roles, with each of them trying to achieve different goals as enacted by their frequent tasks inside the platform.

By presenting this evidence we were granted 2 weeks for full-time discovery process. This would later help us steer requirements in a more user-centered direction.

Food for thought

Mapping and understanding the right problems

Discovery kicked-off with a round of phone calls with select stakeholders to review product challenges and solidify long term vision into actionable design goals.

Then we interviewed both customers and RFS sales reps separately, looking to gain more insight about our users roles, attributes and context. Conversations helped us understand some initial archetypes found on FUA tests and build proto-personas.

User personas — Consolidated interview findings

Following the discussion and modification of personas with sales reps, we were able to conduct a remote workshop in which they defined the typical “as is” user journey for each persona and identified pain points in the experience.

“As Is” user journeys — Omni-channel experience audit of digital and physical touchpoints

Getting to the root cause

Insights gathering & scope definition

We made sense of user research by uncovering patterns and connections that led to insights. After clustering data items in categories and assigning them a priority we found recurrent themes across ideas and formed insight statements.

Affinity diagrams, themes & insights

Based on these findings plus stakeholders expectations we talked with Reinhart to fine tune project definition and scope; we ended up incorporating insights from user research into mobile app requirements and prioritizing the product backlog

Most of our research deliverables were conceived digitally to emphasize real cross-collaboration. Being remote made it difficult for me to stick to in-person research conventions that posed a threat to the team visibility and findings integrity, thus I leveraged on online tools to conduct, share and get quick input.

How might we ideate?

Reframing problems to find opportunities

Knowing pain points in the experience I used the “how might we” method to reframe insights and challenges, turning them into opportunities for design. HMW sets an ideal environment for innovative thinking.

Formulating “how might we” statements for ideation

In-depth task analysis

Working backwards to reduce complexity

To find optimization opportunities behind common tasks I deconstructed them into activities by doing a hierarchical task analysis (HTA). I prioritized tasks to address based on demand, as conveyed by their frequency of use.

Deconstructing user-centered and goal-based task flows

Via deconstructing “as is” task flows I worked backwards from completion point, making activity blocks more efficient and eliminating redundant steps in the process, that reduced overall complexity and created new conceptual flows like the one above.

Breaking the “happy path” bubble

Putting design into context

When doing a task, most of the time our mental models get either affected or enhanced by the surrounding context.

During research we noticed that this topic was important for our product due to the particular environments where digital interactions often take place, such as kitchens (chefs), freezers (inventory managers), street roads (sales reps) and so on.

Mapping external and internal human factors

The purpose of contextualizing design was to anticipate and plan for those different factors that may influence the experience in a given situation and hopefully prevent pain points. Interesting features such as offline order queues were baked out of this.

Going with the flow

Merging information architecture and interactions

Our information architecture was designed ensuring that cognitive load and decision making efforts during flows remained minimal.

To do so, we followed cognitive principles like Miller’s and Hick’s law to respectively maintain UI options beneath the working memory average and mask decisions over a progressive disclosure strategy that would allow us to diminish decision time.

High level app flow showcasing IA and IxD

The design articulation behind IA and interaction flows had to do with our need to optimize for learnability, repeated use, user-driven information display and fast interactions that were equally efficient to both new and heavy-duty users.

The cherry on the cake

Project outcome & reflections

To ease design handoff we centralized all product documentation into a meticulous and comprehensive “source of truth” package for Reinhart's graphic design team to take over.

Reflecting on opportunities for improvement, even though design worked in sprints we failed to enforce an agile workflow for the product team, hence the project lasted longer than it should because of constant “last minute” requirement additions to the backlog that forced us to change the design scope repeatedly.

As for interesting challenges I think that the biggest one was to extend UX design beyond UI, there was a misconception about our role that we constantly had to fight back by pitching the process, evidencing the impact of it and then taking deliberate actions towards common goals.

Date

Late-2016

Platforms

Native — iOS & Android (Xamarin)

Tools

Axure, XMind, RealtimeBoard, UXPressia & Confluence

Team

Nick Shock — Business Analyst

Berni Beltramo — Project Manager

Sergio Lizárraga — UX Designer

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