Kitchens are a whirlwind of activity, especially during peak hours. When the timing's off, it's not just the food that suffers – it's the whole dining experience. Customers were letting us know about a particularly frustrating scenario: their meal arriving way later than their companions'. Digging into our data, we saw this issue was most common during those crazy, busy rushes.
After analyzing the problem, the culprit seemed clear. Orders were trickling in from the same table at different times, leaving the kitchen scrambling. We theorized that if we added a slight, behind-the-scenes delay for tables with multiple diners, those orders would batch together. This would smooth things out for the kitchen, allowing them to get everything out at once. Introducing any delay sounds risky, but this change was completely invisible to the customer and targeted a major pain point.
The results speak for themselves. Complaints about staggered food dropped dramatically, boosting both customer and restaurant satisfaction. It turns out, small tweaks can have a big impact, especially when they solve those everyday annoyances that make or break a dining experience.
With the development of me&u Flex, we were adding a whole new dimension to digital ordering: group ordering. Our aim was to mirror the familiar flow of traditional casual dining, with shared menus, conversations around what to order, and everything arriving together. But behind the scenes, this new feature had to work seamlessly with our existing order batching system. After all, that system was crucial for preventing those frustrating mistimed meals.
The challenge was in explaining this batching process to customers. Restaurants understand it, but for diners, it's a new concept. We couldn't just scrap the batching – we knew that would create problems. So, how to make it intuitive?
The first step was mapping out the full customer experience for casual dining spaces, from initial browsing all the way to paying the bill. This allowed me to pinpoint where we needed to introduce new messaging around user activity, and beyond that, order batching. I took inspiration from the traditional restaurant experience of a server jotting everything down. Most customers already grasp the idea of waiting until everyone is ready before the order goes to the kitchen, so that afforded us some familiarity around the concept.
We'd experimented with group ordering a few years earlier, and while that version didn't fit our direction at the time, it provided valuable insights. One key takeaway was that making the process of coordinating orders entirely behind-the-scenes caused confusion. Without understanding the need to submit orders together, and the potential for occasional technical mishaps, customers weren't always set up for a smooth dining experience.
We realised the solution lay in providing a degree of visibility. Customers needed to understand the concept and its impact on their meal timing. However, it was crucial to find a way to communicate this without making the ordering process feel overly complex or burdensome.
My thinking was this: combine an activity tracker with a clear "holding" stage for orders. This would give customers an intuitive understanding of two key things. Firstly, it would show them who was at their virtual table, and what stage of ordering everyone was in. That in itself added some of the social aspect of traditional dining. It also opened up the possibility of later displaying order batching status.
Secondly, we needed a way to communicate that their order was ready, but we were intentionally waiting for others to finish up. This way, they knew why a slight delay was happening. Of course, we couldn't keep customers locked into waiting forever, so it was equally important to allow them to override that hold if they decided it was unnecessary. That was all about keeping each step in the process clear and focused, without creating frustration.
Beyond the Order screen, we also needed to globally communicate the order holding behaviour, so that users knew how their table was progressing. A traditional signal would be closed menus in front of each guest, however with everyone on their own device, we needed a global signal to facilitate users to have conversations and move the ordering process along. As such, we added a activity notification to the primary action.
We launched the pilot version of Flex, complete with the new order holding & activity features. We carefully monitored customer feedback, particularly for any unspoken signals that the new process was causing confusion. To our relief, the "waiting" stage seemed intuitive to most users, and any initial concerns about disruption were quickly alleviated. Our tracking data showed strong understanding of the feature and, most importantly, a high rate of successful order completion. While we continued to gather data and refine the messaging, the core concept proved successful.
