US Foods
US Foods is a national foodservice distributor, offering food products and industry services to restaurants across the United States.
Role
-
UX Lead (design & research)
-
Client management
Scope
-
UX Design
-
UX Research
-
Workshop facilitation
Summary
The goal of this project was to redesign their public facing website which aimed at showcasing the value US Foods offers to prospective customers as well as an entry point for existing customers to create and manage orders.
Problem space
The client had a series of fragmented digital properties including a marketing website and a system for ordering products. Overall, the client's digital presence wasn't unified which impacted how prospective customers were perceiving the brand and subsequently, conversion rates.
Approach
Existing insights
The team leveraged secondary research from stakeholder and customer interviews to begin the task analysis.
Co-creation
After leveraging the research insights, the team was able to use a content-first approach to map each customer journey.
Research
Context
Sign-up flow
Since the team was solving for conversion, we needed to ensure that accessing and completing the sign-up flow was an easy task for both prospective customers and existing clients.
Design principles
The goal for sign-up was to keep it simple, while capturing data points from the user which would then be leveraged to provide a personalized experience. Conversational UI was applied to step 2.
4. Key finding and recommendation
Research plan
1. Methodology
The team conducted a usability study to assess efficiency and ease-of-use for the sign-up flow. The sessions were conducted within the participant's working environment for greater context. A clickable, medium-fidelity prototype was created to represent the sign-up flow experience.
2. Participants
Recruitment criteria
-
Major decision maker for the restaurant.
-
Primary person ordering product from US Foods.
In the end, the final list of recruits was comprised of
Chefs or Restaurant Operations Managers
3. Analysis
The team analyzed the findings as a group while mapping insights to the designs that represented the conversion flow. This allowed the team to co-own the research analysis while conducting this task in a more efficient way.
Insights were prioritized and delivered to the client through a findings and recommendations report.
Sign-up flow was confusing
-
Finding: All participants found the conversational aspect of the sign-up flow to be confusing and didn't see the value around entering this information.
-
Recommendation: Remove the inputs on step 2 to provide a one-step sign-up flow.
End result
Final design - homepage
The final design package took into account the end user's need to have a simplified and extremely efficient experience which would allow them to conduct their online tasks with ease so they could focus on running their business.
Final design - Customer dashboard
The customer dashboard was one of the most well received pages of the redesign. Leveraging data points such as location, restaurant type and order details allowed the design team to personalize this authenticated experience.
Reflection
When the team took time to debrief as a group, one common aspect of the project kept coming up over and over; observing the participants (Chef's and Restaurant Operations Managers) in their actual working environment while using the prototype was incredibly valuable. The team was able to experience the hectic environment in which Chef's and Managers would be using the website. In addition, the team was able to use that insight and include the learnings on future iterations. As the lead designer and researcher, I learned that observing users in their environment through field research is incredibly insightful.