4 weeks
Product Design, Visual Design, Mobile Design
Product Designer, UX Researcher
Amber Waves Farm
Amber Waves Farm is a working farm, market, and restaurant, located on the east end of Long Island, NY. It grows vegetables and sells them to local restaurants as well as the cafe on the farm.
As the produce provider for several local restaurants, Amber Waves’ current order collection process of emailing and texting requires the field manager to constantly check incoming orders while working on a field.This unorganized procedure easily causes stress and human errors.
Revamp the ordering process for chefs ordering produce from Amber Waves to simplify and streamline order collection for Amber Waves employees, which essentially takes unnecessary stress away and bolsters their work mentality.
A brand new mobile app for chefs to understand the quantity and quality of the products they would like to order, which essentially saves time and prevents frustration.
Chefs can order their kitchen staples from the app’s homescreen to take the shortcut and save time.
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Easily add a product, customize it, or make it a favorite for future use.
Chefs can favorite one of their saved lists to quickly reorder everything they need, with just one click.
Details such as color, quality, and spiciness are listed for easy reference since every chef has their own needs for dishes they want to create.
When a product has low stock, the app gives chefs a distinct warning and quantity left to avoid chefs from ordering amounts Amber Waves is unable to fulfill.
*STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW AND USER INTERVIEW WERE CONDUCTED BY BITESIZE UX AND SYNTHESIZED BY ME; ALL DESIGNS ARE MY OWN
In order to create an effective solution to incorporate Amber Waves’ needs as well, we wanted to learn more about the current process, challenges, and business goals of Amber Waves employees. We conducted a stakeholder interview with Isabel Milligan, Farm & Wholesale Manager at Amber Waves, to learn more about the business, its goals, and challenges.
Constantly attending to incoming orders
Conglomerating information manually causes errors
Repetitive questions on orders
Can’t scale if continue to use this process
Being able to get all orders in a single place in order to create efficiency for Amber Waves
Bring satisfaction to their customers, aka restaurant chefs.
Besides understanding from the business perspective, we also conducted an interview with a future user of our app, Chef Jack, a restaurant chef based in Long Island, to further understand the needs and pain points of our users in order to find ways to strike a balance between user needs and business goals.
Not having enough or specific ingredients for dishes he wants to create
Having to communicate often and repetitively in order to make sure order is correct
Unable to see new arrivals or sales on the current tool
Needing to submit orders for kitchen staples such as onions, garlic, and carrots over and over again
Being able to order anything he needs when multitasking, convenience is key
A tool for him to place an order quickly, as he’s always on the go and doesn’t have a lot of time
Feeling confident when placing an order from produce providers — especially with getting the right ingredients and quantity
After the user interview with Chef Jack, I synthesized the insights and conglomerated information that would have an impact on my design decisions into a persona chart.
With the help of the stakeholder and user interviews, I was able to depict the user flow and pinpoint the steps that could lead to potential errors. With those in mind, I ideated the updated user flow incorporating features that aligned with the user and stakeholder needs.
I started with rough sketching several key screens on my iPad. Sketching first allowed me to experiment with different layouts and navigation.
With the busyness and type of work chefs do on a daily basis, it made more sense to me to create a mobile app instead of a website for this project. A mobile app enables chefs to multitask and doing things on the go.
After designing a high-fidelity prototype, in order to test out my prototype from a perspective of fresh eyes, I conducted user testing sessions with three potential users.
One challenge to do testing for this product is that I did not have access to any real chefs working at actual restaurants — I decided to recruit “casual chefs” who occasionally mass ordering ingredients and hold dinner parties to do user testing in a think-aloud style.
After the participants finished performing the tasks I assigned them, I synthesized feedback into a few categories. I addressed these issues through the next few rounds of iterations.
The final design incorporated feedback from user testing and UI iterations, and most importantly, this app helped solve chefs' previous pain points with ordering produce from Amber Waves.
Now the mobile app enables them to:
"One-Click Order" on Homescreen is every chef's best friend
Chefs now know exactly the quantity, quality, and colors of products they order
Chefs are busy and always on the go - ordering produce on the mobile app now offers peace of mind
I created the mood board first to lead me through the visual design of the app. Images and colors of vegetables also inspired to set the main tone of the app to be olive green and tomato red.For type choice, to optimize for readability, I selected two sans serif fonts - Libre Franklin for headers and Millard for sub-headers and body copy. The two fonts complemented each other well and give the app a clean and simple look and feel.
I would use the below metrics these to measure user goals:
Time spent on ordering produce before vs. after
Retention rate - inclination for chefs to re-order from Amber Waves
I would use the below metrics these to measure business goals:
Time spent on gathering orders for wholesale manager per day before implementing the tool vs. after
% increase in revenue and new restaurant partners
It was a great learning experience designing a tool for restaurant chefs, a group of professionals I’m not particularly familiar with, but learned a lot about. While developing ideas and designing specific features, I had to balance between user goals and business impact so both could be met. It truly helped me think and rethink my design decisions.
If I were to continue on this project, I would love to explore the chat pages and features to make wholesale ordering even easier more chefs.
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