Process
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Favor Delivery
Austin, TX
Visualization of sales data for Favor's merchant partners
Problem Space
I was exploring Favor's relationships with their restaurant partners for my capstone project.
Favor Delivery is growing rapidly and wanted to identify their stance with the merchants amidst all the competition.
My focus was identifying who the merchants are and what are their needs. After researching, I designed a part of proposed solution for Favor.
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Project Immersion
To understand Favor's business goals and objectives, I interviewed Lauren who was also my supervisor. Here are some questions that I raised which also became my problem statement:
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Who are Favor's restaurant partners?
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What is their perspective towards Favor?
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How can we enhance their experience ?
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Next I started evaluating what the competitors are offering to understand the food delivery landscape from the restaurant's perspective.
Takeaways:
Integration
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Lack of POS integration and ability to update menus is the biggest problem for restaurants. Also, the order protocol is inconsistent for Favor.
Insights
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The competitors provide a dedicated portal where merchants can access all the data and insights while Favor is not providing this
Support
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The support services offered by the competitors lack the personal touch provided by Favor. Favor is reachable and merchants appreciate it.
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I decided to interview merchants as it was a very broad problem space and I wanted to get a deeper understanding of their relation with Favor.
While I was waiting for interviews getting scheduled, I interviewed with Favor's Accounts team who are the first contact with the merchants. I also interviewed the CRO, Keith Duncan to understand Favor's vision.
Initial focus:
Interviews conducted:
6
Accounts Team Members
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CRO
3
Restaurant Managers
Merchant
onboarding
Perception of Favor
Ordering and Delivery
Merchant Profiles
After talking to account executives and managers I identified three merchant profiles with different needs.
1. National Brands
National Brands with multiple locations all across the country having standardized and optimized processes.
Ex: McDonald's
Needs:
POS Integration
Access to meaningful insights
2. Mid sized restaurants
Medium sized restaurants which may have multiple locations in Texas dealing with speciality or local cuisine.
Ex: Torchy's Tacos
Needs:
Seamless Experience
3. Mom and Pop shops
Small local businesses serving a limited customer base.
Ex: Food truck
Needs:
Expand business with low investment
Upfront payment
Favor's Strength
Local Brand and associated with HEB
One of the main reasons why the restaurants partner with Favor is because they want to support local business and they feel associated with HEB as Texans.
Relationship with the Accounts team
All the restaurant managers I interviewed shared that their favorite thing about Favor against other competitors is the personal assistance they receive from the Accounts team.
Upfront Payment
The biggest differentiator for Favor from a merchant's perspective is that the payment is made through a credit card and they receive it instantly. While with the competitors they get paid every two weeks.
Opportunity Areas
Lack of integration
As Favor's goal is to expand partnerships with the merchants, the biggest obstacle that it is facing is the lack of POS integration which is crucial for bigger restaurants chain to manage huge volumes of orders.
Lack of complex insights
Account managers also reported that bigger merchants seek complex sales insights to boost their revenue. Favor currently offers only simple insights which are not deep enough for many merchants.
Based on the interviews, I came up with a persona for the merchant as a user.
For this persona, I created journey maps to visualize the onboarding process and ordering-to-delivery process.
Onboarding process
Order-to-delivery journey map
Ideation
I started designing the merchant portal by coming up with user requirements with a senior designer. Next, we prioritized the features based on importance and viability of design as many features were dependent on other Favor projects in progress. The decisions were also based on availability of precedence for me, as the product team was busier than usual due to COVID-19 pandemic.
Design
I started designing by making rough sketches and basic layout with a "quantity over quality" mindset to cover as many scenarios as I can. I also did another round of interviews with focus on finding how restaurant managers analyze sales data.
I divided the requirements into three categories- sales, customer and behavior. For this , I considered two layouts in the beginning. I went ahead with a single page scrollable layout as fit makes comparison of data easier than in tabs.
I started with quickly sketching multiple layouts and thinking about what each element could look like, ensuring comprehensive and comprehensible data without overwhelming the user.
I came up this high level page layout for different features based on the importance of each feature. As a team we decided not to include cancellation reasons and customer behavior data for the first version as Favor doesn't capture that data from the users presently.
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Visualizing sales data on top
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User ratings and customer satisfaction
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Sales Insights
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Top selling items
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Customer Reviews
Designing piece by piece
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Sales Data
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User Rating and Customer Satisfaction
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Sales Insight
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Top selling items
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Customer Reviews
Putting the pieces together
Final Outcome
Based on the interview data, I designed and placed elements on the screen. I experimented with the visual hierarchy to come to this final outcome which would fulfill restaurant owners' requirements.
Lessons
This project made a lot of impact on me as a professional designer as it let me utilize everything I have learned at school in a professional setting. Favor Delivery gave me a broad space to explore and asked me to come up with a problem statement. Personally this was the most challenging aspect of my entire capstone project. It was a big takeaway for me to learn how to take up a big task and narrow down the scope to deliver something meaningful.