Quandoo Checkout – Mobile Payments for Restaurants

Key Problems

Since starting restaurant business in 2012, Quandoo team has connected more than 50 million diners with restaurants. But besides of positive cases, Quandoo has discovered a bunch of unsolved problems:

• It is hard to get the waiter’s attention in busy hours.
• Visitors are wasting their time while waiting for a bill.
• Splitting a bill takes time.
• Thus many visitors are too polite to say the truth, merchants want to know whether a visitor likes a dish or doesn’t.

Design Sprint

To make a quick step ahead of a problem, a design sprint with an external agency was conducted. The hypothesis was:

“An innovative payment solution will reduce friction during check-out segment of a dining out flow for our customers, improving user experience, and make our service more attractive.”

Outcomes

The team voted on the solutions and in the end, the 3 deciders cast their decisive votes on different parts of different solutions.
The winning solution was based on “Conversational UI”.

Conversational interfaces are platforms that mimic a conversation with a real human.

“In the last day, we tested our prototype with 5 target customers from Berlin who’s income is >50,000 Euro/year and eat out more than 3 times/week. The concept was successfully validated.”

User Personas

The methodology is often called useless and unrealistic and being misused by many companies. The main reasons are:

1. a lack of knowledge what it stands for
2. wrong implementation.

TWe didn’t want to make these mistakes again and have taken the profile of the real customer who came to us and who find this solution very attractive and useful.

The next steps

Armed with design requirements generated from the research findings, the next phase of the project is design. This includes ideation, user flow, low-high fidelity prototypes and mockups.

User flow

User flow is a series of steps a user takes to achieve a meaningful goal. Another purpose of it is to explain a team the logic behind a design.

A user flow was built. Please, check it online here for a better overview

Welcome screen

When a waiter or waitress brings a menu, he/she also introduces a Check Out. There is also a unique QR code lies on each table. To start a payment flow it is mandatory to scan a QR code and open a link.

iOS devices support scanning codes out from the box using a standard camera app. Some Android devices require to have a QR Scanner app, which might be challenging.

The scanning part is not perfect yet and should be replaced by better ways to connect a device with a bill: WIFI access point, Bluetooth beacon.

Split the bill

Once “Split” option is selected in the conversation above, a user goes to a bill overview with 2 ways to split the bill:

1. either pay by item, selection those to pay for
2. or evenly, splitting a bill into equal parts

Tips

One of the sub-goals of Check Out is to get the support of waiters by making them receiving more tips comparing to usual (offline) way. To make it happen I used a simple slider with a default state of 10% that goes to a waiter. A selected tip will be explicitly shown before payment.

Payments

We support credit cards, Apple Pay, and Android Pay. The fastest payment solution we tested, so far, was Apple Pay, which was just released for Germany.

Rating

One of the biggest benefits for restaurants’ owners is getting honest feedback about dishes and service. We integrated food and service rating into a flow.

For the food rating, the number of dishes is limited by 3 the most expensive items from the bill.

Nobody wants to rate water, coffee or anything small, obviously.

For the waiter’s rating, we use Uber-alike system. First, we need to know is feedback negative or positive and then we ask to clarify it. For example: if a user gives a waiter 1 star, we ask what he didn’t like the most.

And for any case, it is allowed to send text feedback.

Leaving a restaurant

More than half of our interviewees showed an interest to receive a digital receipt. After a few iterations, we integrated this step naturally in a flow.

The last action required from visitors is to show “Wave a waiter” screen to staff.

This is rather a temporary limitation until we build a notification channel for waiters to get them to know that table is paid.

Evaluation

Proper usability testing was conducted 3 times during the design process.
The purpose was to get feedback from target users to iterate the product and validate core functionality.

I learned what aspects of the design were working and what aspects needed further exploration. After getting feedback from users, these insights were implemented into decision making and design iterations.

For example, it was discovered that tinder-alike rating of food was not clear and nobody got how to drag and drop food cards. I didn’t work and was replaced by simple stars system.

Guerilla Testing

The organization of usability testing and writing summaries takes a week and very often something faster is needed. The concept of guerilla testing is a perfect choice for quick feedback round. 1 full day is enough to catch 4-5 people to test a rapid prototype, made in Invision or Marvell.

One of those is shown below.

In conclusion

The project is moving on and doing constant improvements. Let’s see the path a team of 12 has made.

May 2018 – Design Sprint
June 2018 – Kick Off
July 2018 – MVP
September 2018 – The first test with external users
November 2018 – Internal beta testing in a restaurant in London
January 2019 – Launch in a partner restaurant

What is coming:

• Order meals from a device
• Make Check Out part of Quandoo mobile app
• Publish food reviews