Google Design Challenge
The Background
Ratings and reviewing requests are everywhere. Companies, both digital and traditional, and individuals, whether they are investors, managers, professors, and artists, want to know what we are thinking. They send out surveys in the room or pop up review window on the screen. Sometimes we fill the reviews -- of words and sentences -- with heart, while most of the time it is just a process. However, when we receive others' comments and ratings on us, we still get nervous. Everyone cares about how people see them.
To start a design project within this trend in dining industry, I came over on the first hand to watch the culture background.
Server == Actor
The whole dining experience cannot be superb without the first-class service, just like we cannot critique a play by focusing solely on the script, with no thought to the actor’s delivery. The old-fashioned only-food-matters style has dramatically evolved recently. Business owners realize they can never invest too much in service quality since it, in turn, brings remarkable revenue boost.
Personal branding stands out
Personality makes people remember you, and that’s the reason why nowadays business owners dig into consumer behavior deeply to structure unique branding, and at the same time individuals have tremendous opportunities to construct self-branding. Thus, strengthening career with personal branding becomes exciting for servers.
A Data-driven world after all
Data’s potential just keeps growing. Taking full advantage means business owners must incorporate analytics into their strategic vision and use it to make better, faster and unique decisions.
The Process
My process was organized in an optimized Double Diamond frame. It is largely characterized by building deep empathy, by stringing together underlying connected data and personality and by rapidly prototyping ideas to get the job done. Here are the process map and some of the highlights of the project:
The Principles
Design principles can help me make design decisions and move forward. It is of vital importance to choose the right design principles according to the characteristics of the project. In this project, I believe I should follow the following three design principles:
The Challenge(s)
My challenge here was to provide a way to focus on evaluating individual servers. Design an experience where diners can submit positive comments and constructive suggestions for the wait staff, and servers can use this feedback to both improve and help to secure new employment.
Rip the original challenge
I stepped out by ripping the original challenge. There are two roles in the original challenge, the diners, and the wait staff. However, I believe there is one more hidden user group: business owners.
Based on the initial research of the online articles and comments, I wrote down problems related using post-it and cluster them under topics. Thus, I obtained a deep understanding of the challenge and started research with clear goals.
Tailor value to various users
For Diners vs. Servers
In this project, there are mainly three stakeholders: Diners, Servers and Business Owners.
Let's focusing on the diners and servers firstly.
Field Research helps me build empathy with customers
Capturing a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people I am designing for” is the first and foremost steps in any design process. Designers need understand stories behind data and evidence. Empathy helps me on this.
I like hearing people's stories. Nothing is better to get inspirations from a real and vivid story from your customers. With the ripped challenges, I went the best restaurant in Ithaca and paid attention to every aspect throughout the dining experience. Also, I post the topic on my social platform to attract "recruit" users.
I understand my users by learning their knowledge. Articles like "Server’s Bible: 101 Tips How To Be A Good Restaurant Waiter", 'The Best Server Tips and Tricks from Reddit" help me to think problem from their perspective.
Mapping insights in a process view
After discover and learn insights from the field research and desk research, I move forward to map them in a process view. User Journey map and Emotion experience map help me reveal underlying connections between insights logically and prioritize them.
Challenge A: How might we design a review experience with pleasure and empathy?
Power the Review Experience with Augmented Reality
Goals:
• Pop up review and rating requests at the right moment without disturbing diners' dining experience and with the purpose to even enhance the pleasure;
• Raise diners' tolerance to passively tasks by bringing on WOW!! experience;
• Build diners' empathy on servers by raise awareness of their contribution to servers' career;
• Precisely tailor the info hierarchy with frictionless and clarity;
• Take advantage of Google ecosystem;
The Solution for Challenge A
Capture a perfect moment: fortune cookie time
To start with designing the review part for the diner end, I recalled the insights from journey map and dig into the time duration between diner request the bill to diner sign on the receipt.
Create a cartoon avatar to draw empathy
For the server end, I designed the following page to allow waiters or waitress to craft the cartoon version of themselves. It helps servers easily build the close relationship with diners. Meanwhile, it constructs the base for the following designs.
Bring on AR request to raise diners' tolerance
Slow design principles help me to get this idea. In order to lower users stress and burden, besides speeding up or skipping the redundant steps, it is also important to raise users' tolerance by focusing on the "right" and "important" moment.
After finding the perfect "fortune cookie" time to push request, the next task is to build an impressive, unexpected opening to finish the work of raise users' tolerance. Google' ARCore and newly launched scanning feature of chrome app provide a sound opportunity to bring AR into this project.
By using servers’ cartoon avatar to pop up the request, diners’ tolerance to the following tasks will be raised. Thus, they are more willing to giving solid and positive reviews and comments.
Enhance diners awareness of contributions
Push the request is not the end of the experience. To keep motivating diners giving reviews back to servers, it is important to enhance diners awareness of their contributions to servers' career. Compared to other motivation methods such as giving coupon or discount, building the empathy between diners and servers is a more sustainable way to achieve the goal.
For Business Owners
Again, tailor value to business owners means one thing and one thing only, the business impact.
I compared two kinds of rating system and the data collected by them. I believe tags is a better rating system as the data collected has much more potential by connecting the diversity to other data collected from Google service.
Challenge B: How might we utilize the reviewing data to boom the business?
Leverage Server Recruiting and Managing System with Data
Goal:
• Utilize the reviewing data for business acceleration;
• Enhance the sense-making process to search proper fit for business owners ;
• Dynamic data analytic report to help the wait stuff tailor their profile and improve their service.
• Precisely set the info hierarchy with frictionless and clarity.
• Take advantage of Google's data power
The Solution for Challenge B
Connect tags with true business impact
By connecting tags with enough data, this system can empower business owners can servers by the real business impact. For example, a new restaurant may need servers who can bring back more returns, while the restaurant facing a low revenue may need servers who can bring higher consumption.
Implement data to enhance management
I designed the business owners' interface on the laptop to empower their business with a clear capture of the status of their business and their employees.
Take it a step further
Here is the conclusion of my design solutions. As time and resource is limited, I tried to mainly contribute my creative thinking and deep insights of a product firstly. More work need to do to finish the functionality and system establishing.
I finished this project within a week and time is insufficient for dig deeper into the details. I believe there are following aspects that should be done in the future work.
• User test for the AR trigger review process. More work needs to be done here to adjust the AR experience including enhancing the interaction between AR avatar and diners, reducing unnecessary steps to make it frictionless.
• Discuss with data analysts about the algorithm of GScore. As I proposed the solution based on my knowledge of data science and driven by human need, I need to polish the concept better with the underlying science. Especially the reasonability of GScore.
•Consider "Google-wins" agnostic. My target is to discover problem from user end but apply the power of Google during the implementation. However, I believe I was still influenced by the "Google wins" thinking during research period. As a product need to deliver an overall brand to users, more research needs to be done to current Google service to place the product better in them Google ecosystem.