UX Review of Fourth's hospitality bulk ordering app
Fourth provides customers with a number of applications to perform various hospitality functions such as receiving their goods or counting their stock.
My duty was to conduct user research with hotels and restaurant users, and create a report to share with the company on actions to take, and provide additional ideas of how we can improve the Ordering App.
Background
Ordering App is an application used by large hotel franchises such as IHG to purchase bulk goods, for both consumables and non-consumables. The Ordering App was created in 2015 with no user research, no user testing and released to IHG and a few other clients and was met with a mediocre response.
After numerous complaints and discussions for improvement from our clients, I was asked to perform a UX review on the Ordering App which would highlight the issues from the most compromising and problematic to ‘quick wins’ or easy fixes. My aim after this UX review was performed was to use this as a guide for future updates, which I wanted to immediately test after with real participants at restaurants such as Frankie & Benny's, and a well known hotel chain.
The UX Review and Usability Testing
I went through the entire application thoroughly, and performed a usability test on the Ordering App before publishing my UX Review.Since the company itself is very large, I also wanted to create a one-page summary of the top 5 most frustrating usability issues that Fourth should focus on updating for users.
After sharing my findings with the company, the decision was made to focus on some of the smaller elements to update while simultaneoulsy looking at more fundamental issues, such as the product list pages and how they are designed.
Since this UX Review, the Ordering App is slowly but surely changing for the greater good of the user and reaching the goal of providing a faster, more efficient procurement experience.
Concepts for the future Ordering App
Below are a few sketches of how it could potentially be improved, but since the ordering app depends on other systems to display quantitative product information, the likelihood is that we will have to introduce each of these suggested changes one by one after testing thoroughly to see how it performs.
The existing UI
Ideating how we can improve this UI
After this UX review, I set up a schedule alongside the engineering team and PO for the ordering app on what we could tackle based on priority and complexity.
If you'd like to read the review, please view it here.