Food delivery is one of the most promising online businesses these days – but how can especially small businesses stay competitive and independent from the big aggregators? For Cilantro, a new F&B logistics startup, I created the overall information architecture of their multi-platform service, directed the UX design team and built prototypes for the brand's different applications.
The food and beverages (F&B) market is a fast growing online business around the world. If you run a restaurant, you can choose from a large variety of products and services that allow you to set up an online store, manage your outlets, or offer CRM and point-of-sale capabilities. Cilantro is a young startup based in Singapore that offers an all-in one solution to engage with your customers and to grow your online business independently.
Cilantro's founders approached us with a clean slate, so the initial phase of the project was very much shaped by Service Design exercises, long before the first wireframes were drawn. As the Lead Designer of this project, I was involved with the client from the very first briefing in late 2015, when we sat together in MING Labs’ new Singapore office regularly and went through countless iterations of user journeys and information architecture drafts until the overall architecture of the platform started to take shape.
The Cilantro platform consists of several interconnected modules that cater to different user groups and device types. During an extensive ideation and brainstorming phase, we developed the concept of different modules, using user stories and personas, customer journeys and data element maps.
A web store acts as the end customer facing piece of the platform. A restaurant business using Cilantro can set up a fully fledged, mobile responsive online store and offer its products in highly customisable ways, e.g. in different variations and with additional modifiers, as menus and set meals, using promotions and so forth. The web store frontend also allows a high degree of freedom regarding the visual appearance and branding of the store.
The Order Management component is a web app used by restaurants staff to receive incoming orders, relay it to kitchen staff and dispatch delivery couriers. The application is designed for use on desktop computers and tablets alike, with a strong focus on the latter, as user research showed us that many restaurants use iPads to manage their incoming orders.
As the product’s third component, an Admin panel acts as the backend application for restaurant staff to create products and menus, organise their outlets and manage their kitchen and delivery staff.
Based on these findings, we started the design of three different modules plus a product website, along with an overall brand direction for the product. As the UX design lead, I was responsible for the general project setup, hosted the initial ideation workshops and, together wit the client, created and maintained the product's information architecture. In subsequent project steps, I was working on the admin panel component and created its interaction design and visual design.
Cilantro launched in July 2017 with a series of pilot customers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Berlin, and plans to roll out it service in additonal cities.
Check out this and other projects at christianbehrens.com.
