Shared Mods
Reducing menu setup time
Overview
Dine.Direct is a community that gives local partners advanced technology so they can participate in the food delivery economy. The team develops cause-driven food marketplaces with web & app ordering and integrations with local delivery providers.
In this case study, we addressed the time-consuming challenge faced by busy restaurant owners in setting up and managing food modifications for their menu items. Our goal was to streamline this process, enabling them to create and share modifications effortlessly across multiple items. The Shared Mods feature revolutionized the way modifications are handled, significantly reducing setup time and enhancing menu management efficiency.
🚨 The problem
If there’s something to know about restaurant folks is that they are always incredibly b u s y. Just as much as you love customizing your dinner order with different modifications, restaurants aim to offer that flexibility, without wasting too much time setting everything up.
In the past, they had to configure modifications for each individual item. Picture this: 20 dishes sharing the same 8 mods meant they had to set up those 8 mods for every dish. Time consuming, há?
So, we asked ourselves:
How might we improve the process of setting up item modifications in a quick and easy way without wasting too much valuable time?
✅ The solution
Giving restaurant owners the ability to set up modifications only once and shared them across items changed the game. The Shared Mods feature empowers users to set a group of food modifications and shared them across different items.
Think about pizza toppings: love a variety? The pizza place is able to give you options without consuming excessive time. Instead of adding the same 10 toppings to each pizza item, they set them up only once and shared them across all the items they want! Need to make a change? Just change it in one place and it automatically applies to all the shared items!
This feature required a ground-up rethinking of the way food modifications are organized and displayed both for the Restaurant Management Dashboard and the Online Menu.
I led the design efforts for this new feature in Spring 2021, collaborating with a team consisting of PMs, engineers, and QA specialists.
The goals
👤 User: Set up mods only once, saving time.
💼 Business: Offer a different and powerful feature compared to other alternatives in the market.
📱 Product: Maintain the first item modifications concept with a twist on massive options.
The challenge
We all like options when we order food, but there’s a fine line where it can turn overwhelming. The most difficult part about designing this feature wasn’t the Restaurant Management Dashboard phase, but envisioning how the end customer would navigate through the 20 pizza toppings a restaurant has to offer.
To maintain our principle of “order food in just one screen” and avoid moving from screen to screen in the process, we decided to add a Switch allowing restaurant staff to opt for displaying mod options in a bottom sheet if there are more than 5 options.
User’s questions that sparked ideas
We were pretty happy with our first draft of the solution: add a modification, share it across different items. However, to make the Shared Mods work the way restaurant owners wanted, we had to solve questions like:
- And what if I want to charge one of my pizza toppings?
- What if they can choose only one or 3 max?
- What if I want to modify the price of one shared mod and I have 20 of them? How can I look for that only one?
Ahá, time to map some various use cases and work on them within our tight timeline.
1
The restaurant personnel can search for a specific shared mod within their list.
2
Multiple Choice w/ Qty (6)
The end user can select multiple items with a customizable maximum quantity.
3
Forced choice
The end user must select only one modification, which is mandatory.
4
Price
The restaurant personnel can now set a price for each mod they add to the system. If they need to modify it, they can do it only once here, and it will replicate across all the items where this mod is shared.
How it works
Setting up mods made easy
Within the menu settings dashboard, we introduced a Shared Mods tab. Here, restaurant staff can add the Mods, configure their function (forced choice, multiple choice or multiple choice with a max amount), set individual prices and even create a mini mod inside of a mod.
A mini mod inside of a mod: Say what?
Just imagine you own your own pizza place. You love cheese. We all love cheese. Who doesn’t love cheese? Based on this romantic relationship you have with cheese, you offer different types of them.
Saying this, what if a pizza topping is cheese and the restaurant offers different types of cheese? We figured that out!
Sharing mods in 1, 2, 3
Once the mods are ready to go, the user navigates to the Areas & Items tab and select the items where they want to apply the mods. The restaurant chooses a pizza, selects the shared mod created (e.g., pizza toppings) & saves!
Saving Time like a Champ
What if the restaurant needs to tweak a mod or runs out of Pepperoni? Easy-peasy! They can simply edit the shared mod from the same creation place and it will automatically update in all of the items that share that mod.
Results
The feedback we received from restaurants and also our menu building team was extremely positive, with many over the moon by the amount of time we save them.
Post-release, when we compared the time taken to build a menu for a pizza place before and after implementing the feature, we noticed an 85% reduction in time!
Moreover, we’ve also seen an increase in the interest and engagement from new restaurants wanting to know about our platform as a direct result of this live feature.
