Bento-Ya

Bento-Ya is a food business in Washington, DC in its early stages of business planning. They intend to operate as a delivery-only business, taking advantage of the virtual restaurant and ghost kitchen trends growing in the DC metropolitan area. I worked closely with the client to plan, design, and establish their branding and online ordering website.

MY ROLE

A virtual restaurant is an establishment with no physical brick-and-mortar location. Food is prepared for takeout or delivery only, often in a food preparation facility known as a ghost kitchen. By this definition, Bento-Ya aims to compete in the virtual restaurant space, offering an interesting challenge to get users to visit their website to order delivery.

UNDERSTANDING THE MARKET

TALKING TO PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS

To gather more qualitative data about our potential user's motivations, pain points, and needs, I interviewed 6 DC locals who lived and worked in downtown DC. These participants all had experience ordering food online, and fall under my client’s target customer demographic of a young DC professional. I wanted to answer the question:

INSIGHTS AND ISSUES

1. Word-of-Mouth is a powerful discovery method - there is strong trust in “foodie” friends or coworkers, if a friend suggested it then the user is more likely to try the food place.

2. Delivery is nice but expensive, so users need a reason to justify their order.

3. Appeal of photos and reviews drive ordering decisions.

4. Nutrition information is important because many users are health-conscious and/or have dietary restrictions.

5. Users expect online platforms to be seamless - the growth of online ordering apps and the COVID-19 pandemic have caused a boom in food delivery, but many platforms are falling short of user expectations for efficiency.

All research was presented to my client in a slide deck

While exploring product strategy, I created an empathy map to extract patterns of user needs and frustrations, and laid out the site’s information architecture. Using the research insights as feature value propositions, I also created a list of features to determine must-haves for an MVP website. Prioritization was determined with an impact vs effort analysis. This phase lay the ground work to later wireframe solutions and content strategy.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Given that this was a restaurant website that offered delivery, I proposed a sitemap that incorporated core content for ordering, tracking, and redeeming rewards.

USER FLOW INTERACTION

Following the site architecture, I laid out task flows of a user visiting the site, adding items to cart, and going through Bento-Ya's checkout process. The flows identify and consider how various tasks are connected throughout the ordering process.

A challenge I faced was figuring out the flow for the rewards system, and how users would redeem and check rewards as returning customers.

Based on existing design patterns, users expect rewards information to be easily accessible in their account, but from a business standpoint it was important to move that flow higher up in the ordering process to incentivize users to sign up or redeem.

SKETCHES & WIREFRAMES

Wireframe designs were iterated upon through usability testing and client feedback, with each iteration improving on design choices and visual hierarchy.

Testing was conducted remotely with local DC participants over Zoom. I was able to observe participants’ interactions and had them “think aloud” as they navigated through a prototype.