The Challenge

Restaurant GMs, operators, and owners responded positively to our product but wanted to understand more about how restaurant guests interact with it.

Discovery

Research & Customer Insights

I put together user scenarios based on personas to frame our questions and envision the desired experience. During customer interviews, we learned that while operations and marketing managers found our AI phone concierge easy to set up, they wanted insights into its effectiveness and customer satisfaction. This revealed the need for a simple analytics experience to help them make decisions and highlight Slang’s value.

Key Insight:
• We needed balance between educating users who don’t understand data and providing advanced data for expert users.
• Avoid overcrowding the page with unnecessary charts.

Designing the Solution

Narrowing the Opportunity

Initially, I designed a focused, minimal insights page with smooth interactions that aligned with our priorities. The team was thrilled with the initial design.

Prototyping & Iterative Design

However, we faced a significant challenge: we were locked into using Looker Studio for our dashboard, which heavily affected the project. Collaborating with our incredible front-end engineer, we adapted my designs to be compatible with Looker Studio. This led to an unintended consequence that we initially set out to avoid—a cluttered dashboard filled with charts.

Despite this, we turned the situation into an experiment focusing on what we could control and optimized the order and size of the charts, prioritizing data quality over visual design.

Impact

We worked hard to ensure that we achieve our goals for our customers despite some of the implementation challenges which drastically increased our weekly active users (WAU).Despite the implementation challenges, we reached our goal and the solution exceeded customers expectations, resulting in a significant increase in weekly active users (WAU).

Reflection

I love beautiful visual design. In fact, I’m a huge advocate of it in any product I work on and fight to uphold a high quality bar, but when this project introduced the last minute technical requirements, we had to adapt fast while still shipping a useful product.

This project demonstrated the importance of flexibility to overcome technical constraints and ultimately delivering a valuable feature over a visually appealing screen.

Lessons Learned:

• Adaptability: Being locked into Looker Studio required us to be flexible and find creative solutions to deliver a valuable product despite technical constraints.
• Quality of Content: Ensuring high-quality content can mitigate a less-than-impressive UI.