What? The goal of this project was to identify and address critical usability issues of a point-of-sale (POS) mobile application found as part of a Beta release.

 

Why? The team had made design and feature updates to the software based on reported issues from customers but didn't user test and validate the updates. While some of the past issues were improved upon, Beta users found new issues that impeded the speed and accuracy they depend upon for quality customer service and high throughput of orders.

 

In one of my first projects at this company, I dug into understanding the core issues and making recommendations on improvements.

 

Who? I worked with the POS company's customers, small business owners of counter service restaurants. I worked with owners, managers, and the employees using the POS to place orders and take payments. I also worked closely with the customer support (CS), product management, and user experience (UX) teams. 

 

How? Working with customer support, product management, user experience design, and engineering, I led the user research and assessment efforts. I used several methods to evaluate the application, new design updates, and the final design and implementation, including:

 ~  internal interviews

 ~  survey
 ~  phone interviews
 ~  contextual inquiry and interview
 ~  usability tests

More detail...  After working with the internal teams to better understand the history of prior issues and the new issues, I surveyed and held phone interviews with Beta customers to understand the breadth and depth of issues.

 

I visited customers with CS for direct observation of usage and context, and interviewed some primary users of the POS application. We watched the employees using the POS software and tablet, saw the customer interactions, and began to understand the similarities and differences between business contexts. We got great feedback from the employees and even their customers in real time.

 

We reviewed that consolidated feedback and my recommendations with UX and the teams and brainstormed ways to address, which would fit within the timeline and software and tablet capabilities.

 

We identified common issues that were slowing down these businesses, in particular the need for speed and accuracy. They want to cycle as many customers through as they can. They want to quickly place customer orders and take their payments and for them to be accurate. They want the selection of menu items and payment to be simple and without thought, automatic. Over a couple of iterations, the team focused on improvements to the selection of modifiers for a menu item, better indication that an item has been selected, and the credit card tipping and signature flow.  

 

The UX designer wireframed further improvements for the issues above. I user tested that with customers (employees using the POS that we worked with earlier) and the end customer/guest (recruited via email and flyers).

 

The changes were developed and launched. Follow-on surveys and issues reported to CS indicated improvements in these areas. 

 

I would describe the level of documentation for these efforts as low to medium, with internal teams being as directly involved as possible in visiting and listening to customers and watching the user tests. This helped us to move faster in identifying issues, what to pursue, and how to pursue them.