Overview

Virtual Kitchen Co (recently rebranded to All Day Kitchens) is a distributed restaurant platform that partners with restaurants and food brands to help them make their food more widely available on food delivery services like UberEats, Doordash, and Caviar. In the midst of expanding their kitchens and onboarding new employees, they were experiencing a high rate of order inconsistency due to the high variability of recipes from different restaurants.

Order errors ranged from mixing up sides to forgetting add ons to sloppy plating.

To aid kitchen staff in their work, VKC wanted to create an interactive order tracking dashboard that simultaneously monitor orders and streamline food assembly processes.

High Level Research Questions

To ensure that kitchen staff are supported in their work (and not distracted) as VKC integrates a new order management system we sought to answer the following research questions:

1. Where in the order-making process are meal orders most easily confused?
2. What is appropriate fidelity of information that kitchen staff need to see on the dashboard while they are preparing and assembling orders?
   • Is it more helpful for staff members to see every step or key action steps (i.e. reminders to massage the rice bag, include an add-on ingredient) for a given order?
3. What kind of imagery gets the information across most effectively?
   • and are there opportunities to recycle existing onboarding content (as opposed to building material from scratch)? (clear and scalable)

User Interview Participants

A set of kitchen staff with varying experience from different VKC kitchen locations were interviewed to ensure that the dashboard is supportive for new trainees and staff trainers alike.

It's important to note that each staff operates independently at work. Most of the time, only one staff member is working at a time.

Maria, staff trainer, employee for 1/2 year

Adaly, kitchen staff, employee for ~1 year

Jason, new kitchen staff, employee for 2 months

Interview Findings

Pain points