Personal project
2020 - 2024
Redesigning a Restaurant Experience
Working across restaurant operations, customer experience, digital touchpoints, and marketing to improve how customers discovered, ordered from, and interacted with the business.
The Story
Managing a family-owned restaurant gave me direct exposure to how customer needs, employee workflows, business goals, and digital experiences intersect.
Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I wanted to pivot to a career in user experience design. At the same time, the pandemic started, which significantly impacted my family-run restaurant. As I chatted with employees, family, and customers, I saw this as an opportunity to apply the design skills I learned in class to a real world problem.
Understanding Our Customers
Listening to what customers were already telling me
I was working at the restaurant everyday, I had continuous exposure to customer questions, complaints, behaviors, and feedback.
I combined these everyday observations with surveys and customer conversations to identify recurring needs and opportunities for improvement.
Key Findings
The website no longer reflected the restaurant well
Customers repeated reported that the existing site felt outdated and made it harder to find menu, location, hours, and other information.
Limited new customer-growth
We needed to improve how new customers discover us as at the time, most find us through word-of-mouth.
Customer expectations were becoming increasingly digital
Many operations are moving online.
From Insight to Improvement: Website
Updating the website
The Problems with the Old Website
The old website showed incorrect photos and information. Navigating it was hard, with information concentrated in some areas without clear hierarchy. Overall, customers repeated expressed that the website was very messy, outdated, and unappealing.
The Design Process
I worked on website flows, wireframes, and finding improvements to the online customer journey.
Mapping out the new user flow for an updated website.
Drawing low fidelity wireframes with key interaction areas.
Mapping the interaction flow.
A challenge I faced was that at the time, I did not have the development skills to create an advanced website. This restricted the designs I could implement, but I used what resources I had and worked around the limitations to still achieve the original goal.
From Insight to Improvement: Marketing
Creating and mailing postcard advertisements
One of our limitations was limited new customer growth. To tackle this, I designed promotional materials, menus, and customer-facing content. The biggest project was partnering with the city's newspaper department to mail out promotions ads to nearby neighborhoods.
These are the many iterations I created for the postcards.
The Challenge
One of the biggest challenges I faced was trying to make my designs more "intentional." What does this object mean? What purpose does it serve? What is the audience supposed to take away from this visual?
I overcame this challenge by regularly pausing while working and reflecting on my work by asking myself, "What is the audience seeing?" "What is the meaning of this element, and how does it contribute to the message I'm trying to communicate?" This helps me check that l'm staying focused and helps redirect me toward the design's intention.
Lessons
Designing for customers means understanding the people delivering the experience
This experience taught me to shift from thinking primarily as a business owner to thinking from the customer's perspective. By listening to feedback and observing how people interacted with the restaurant, I learned that effective solutions must balance the needs of customers, employees, and the business. Coming right after my bachelor's degree, it was an especially meaningful opportunity to apply user-centered research and design to a real-world challenge close to home.
