Luna Grill On-the-Go
Case Study
Project Goal
Mobile-based improvement on local business in the service industry. Concept created in two weeks by an unaffiliated team of 3 (Parth Patel, Mureed Ibrahim, and myself)
Project Focus
UX Research, Low-fidelity Prototyping, Digital Prototyping
My Role
Digital Persona, Interview & Survey Questions, Storyboards, Digital Prototype
Tools Used
Adobe Illustrator, InVision, Google Forms
Final Project Deliverable
Mid-Fidelity Clickable Prototype
About
Luna Grill University Center is a busy restaurant visited by students and local employees near the University of California, Irvine. It is a mediterranean stop that myself and my team frequented, but we noticed that their take out process could be improved. We are not affiliated with Luna Grill, but we got some insider info that others were having the same issue and that the users problems were also slowing down the staff. We decided to observe during peak hours, conduct interviews, and collect surveys that led us to discover pain points and design an improvement to their current mobile application.
Overview
Luna Grill and their mobile application is available for download and at the time of this case study they
directed all users to their website to complete take-out orders. On top of having to wait 10-15 seconds
for the site to load, it wasn’t responsive and worked poorly on mobile. We went and observed the restaurant
during lunch, their peak hours to establish our target audience, understand the restaurant’s current procedures,
and conduct informal interviews.
They pride themselves in only taking 15 minutes to get you your food, but during lunch time the line is
usually out the door and the ordering time isn’t taken into account for the countdown. Our observations
showed us that most of the customers are students and employees from the nearby office buildings; both
of whom have limited lunch breaks. So we decided to alleviate the congestion by creating an addition to
the existing app that would allow customers to order their meal ahead of time, skip the line, and pick
up their order when they arrive.
With a very high demand for to go orders from people that would like to quickly grab food, there is no
convenient and time efficient way of ordering food on the Luna Grill mobile application.
Research and Observations
Most employees have a limited lunch break an no one wants to spend a large portion of that time waiting for
their food. Currently, to order food to go. You have to call the only cashier at the store, who also takes
the orders of those in line, and enter the order into the POS system manually. Then once you arrive at
the store, stand in line to pay for the order, before waiting for it to be processed.It causes a bad experience
for the user and for the employees.
We conducted a survey during peak hours at the store and had customers take it while waiting for their
food so that we could get the most accurate results. All customers were either a student or employee of
a company nearby. Most of them seemed to prefer the chicken kabob plate. Also, a third of the customers
waiting in line were getting their food to go. All of those people, could have benefited from ordering
on the app and cut their wait time, which tended to be on average about 13 minutes to get to the cashier.
User Persona
During our observations we noticed that the customers had to wait between 7-14 minutes before getting to
the cashier. When Mureed interviewed Elizabeth, she expressed frustrations with waiting in line to pick
up her order, even though she called in ahead of time, which would cause her to be late for work. Luna
Grill offers a way to order online, but you have to do it on a desktop, so we asked if she has ever tried
that method, but she said “No, I am always on my phone”.
We took the existing app and looked at strategies to alleviate the line congestion by giving it a functioning
ordering section. With our interview, survey results and observations, we created a flow and storyboard
of what we gleaned customers would need to order from Luna Grill.
Storyboards
Wireframes iterated on before digitizing the mobile app.
Designs and Prototypes
With our storyboard we were able to understand key steps our user would need to accomplish the ordering
process specific to Luna Grill. The basis of our design was to create a way to order food and pay for
it before arriving at the restaurant. We also wanted to include a few other interactions that we found
important to the Luna Grill user. We found out in our research, that most people order the same thing
repeatedly and would want a fast way to save and order their favorites. Luna Grill also has a point-based
reward system that we wanted to integrate to automatically add points with each order. The current
application requires customers to scan their receipt to add points.
We created a decision flow diagram to flesh out the screens we needed to create and their functions.
To start, we created it on paper to be able to quickly move pieces around and edit the process. We
had multiple people go through it and see if it was logical for them to get feedback on the flow.
This is the fifth iteration of our paper sketches. The issue we had with previous versions was the
favorite feature. We originally had it within the food customization page, but all of our users would
skip past it. We attempted having the button at the top of the module, on the bottom, and even had
it reveal itself after all the food customizations were selected, but none of this worked.
We tried a swipe to like feature and all of our users were able to find and use the feature. We conducted
a few more test with customers waiting in the Luna Grill line and they loved the prototype.
Final Prototype and Reflections
We then created a mid-fidelity digital prototype uploaded into InVision. We wanted the application to
have as few screens as possible to expedite the ordering process.
With more time, we would test the digital prototype further to see what improvements we could make.
We would also want to have a separate pick-up line created in store and create an option where customers
could order their food and have it ready by a specific time rather than immediately after they order.
To further our favorites experience, we would also want to show the addition of a customized order
added to the favorites tab. Lastly, we would want to have a animated order/process bar here where you
can click on the different steps and their information. The bar would change to indicate how far you
are in the process and show which step you’re currently viewing.
A couple pages of the final result of the project.