Project Overview
Summary -
Looking at Five Guys, and we have a genuine fast food chain powerhouse. Established in 1986 in Arlington, Virginia, Five Guys is best known for not only it’s huge burgers, delicious fries, and well-known milkshakes and drinks, but also the experience its customers are treated to at any one of their 1,500 restaurants worldwide. The message from Five Guys is quite clear: make sure your customers enjoy not only the food that you serve, but also the experience you are offering, and they’ll be back. However, for all the success they have had with their restaurant chains, Five Guys actual application, sadly, lets them down. This is where we came in. We were briefed by Five Guys to redesign their current mobile application. Please see below for the brief.
My role -
As the groups Facilitator, it was my responsibility to make sure all deadlines were met, and all work was completed to the necessary standards. This included all research tasks, the subsequent analysis and type ups, and the designing of the prototypes. Part of being the facilitator meant I took charge of the Design Studio, and made sure it was conducted correctly. This involved ensuring all activities were time boxed to ensure we didn’t spend too long on one particular task, and to maximise the benefits of the session. As mentioned above, I had a major input into all stages of the prototypes (this actually included drawing the paper prototype myself), and then led the usability tests, incorporating some of the feedback gathered into the Mid-Fidelity designs (including creating a group, the menu items, as well as group status information) along the way.
During one of our brainstorming sessions where we were trying to think of a convenient way to make sure the user could flip between their own individual order and group order throughout, I made the suggestion to split the page into two; ‘My Order’ and ‘Group Status’, and then developed the pages to support my idea — with this actually being the final design option we chose to go with. My final input as group facilitator involved uploading the final mockups onto InVision, and then linking them together to show the final flow of the application.
The Brief -
The current Five Guys application has many glitches, and is currently unused by most of the companies loyal customers where most simply don’t even know it actually exists. The apps main goal is to allow users to order and pay for food in advance to avoid queuing in the restaurant, and to further allow them to split the bill throughout the ordering process. None of their competitors currently do this, and aside from making the ordering process easier for their users, the added efficiency should ideally make Five Guys a more appealing restaurant to eat at over their competitors.
Key Deliverables -
To satisfy the needs of the client, a number of key deliverables were required for the project, including:
- Research collaboration on the companies main competitors and the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies as well as user demographics and behaviours.
- Usability tests and analysis of their current platform vs. the instore experience combined with the relevant chart to show this comparison.
- Personas and scenarios.
- Design Studio documentation
- Feature Prioritisation (MVP’s) and User Flows.
- Product sketches and Wireframes as well as the relevant testing of these screens documented appropriately. This included the Low and Mid-Fidelity mockups.
- High-Fidelity mockup.
- Working High-Fidelity Prototype.
- A final presentation to the client.
Results -
The application new design allowed the users to:
- Select either a store collection or delivery, search for a location nearest to them if they were to collect, and select either a group or individual order in a much quicker fashion that requires much less clicks than the previous version.
- The application makes the process of choosing the size of the portions much easier than the previous version, which was oversized and very confusing according to user feedback.
- Flip between ‘My Order’ and ‘Group Status’ throughout.
- Allow the user to order and pay for their meal without worrying about what the others in the group are doing, a key part of the brief.
- Provides the user with an instant and updated order number and collection time, something the previous version did not.
Final High-Fidelity Mockup -
Please see below for the interactive prototype I created for the final High-Fidelity Mockup, or to view a video we created for it on YouTube, please click here.
Final thoughts and reflections -
Overall, for me personally, the project was a great success. As a group, we were able to work together collectively whilst at times generating ideas individual and to solve the brief using a host of different UX practices and techniques along the way. For me, it was my first time not only working in a group on a UX project, but also leading one. Learning how to adapt to what the others in the group thought was the best way forward and sometimes compromising on my own beliefs and ideas was something I feel was a great learning curve, especially with such a strict deadline. Furthering that, working in a group on a two-week design sprint was a really good insight to how things will be in the industry and learning the importance of keeping to deadlines and time boxing activities to make sure we weren’t left short was pivotal to the teams success.
The project emphasised the importance to me of researching and speaking to users, as it took several rounds of doing so to finally produce a product that not only the users liked, but understood. One of the major parts of the brief was to allow the users to order and split the bill, so ensuring we carried out enough researching and testing to make sure we achieved this in an effective way that didn’t involve too many steps (like the old did) was vital.
Going forward into future projects, something I would do more of to improve my own ability to lead a project would be to use more time boxing activities as I found these incredibly productive, and to also continue to allow others to have their say on the best way to solve the brief, before coming back together as a team to create the most viable solution.
The full version of this Case Study can be found on my portfolio.
