REKKI
is relied upon by chefs and restaurant suppliers all over the world, and these users all had a lot to say about the product. How could the team sort the signal from the noise?
The team watching and note-taking keenly backstage during my usability study into the app’s onboarding experience.
Context
REKKI connects thousands of restaurants across the world with local suppliers and the team had always been very proactive in getting feedback from users about the product.
Challenge
Users were very keen to tell the team when they had problems or suggestions. But this came with problems:
The feedback the team heard was always from the loudest and most engaged users, who by definition did not represent the majority.
There were no systems or process for engaging with users on specific, prioritised topics and then recording the findings of that engagement. Research happened in a reactive way and records were ad hoc.
There was usually not a critical mass of findings on a particular theme to reach actionable conclusions that help the team make better decisions.
Delivered
I brought all product managers and designers together to articulate and prioritise all the possible things that could be investigated through user research. I turned this into a research roadmap, with appropriately tailored studies, which involved a wide range of users from across REKKI’s different territories. Within the the first quarter, teams were regularly making vital product decisions based on clear and relevant evidence from users.
I reached out to our users and to chefs across the world to setup a user research panel. This enabled me to run remote research every few weeks throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic with users across Europe and North America, despite the difficulties the restaurant industry was facing. It also drastically cut the lead-in time for research studies to less than 2 weeks.
I created a comprehensive research repository where research was tagged and organised so that anyone in the company could easily browse and explore past findings when they were planning new features.
“Within a few weeks of working at REKKI, it became clear that chefs were extremely tight on time, and that getting informed, thorough research was going to be a challenge. Thankfully, Polly was able to step in and deliver. She made a clear plan on how to conduct research with chefs, easily adapting to the specific challenges of the industry – sometimes interviewing chefs while they were prepping vegetables for the evening service.
Very soon, her user insights were so thorough that she became an instrumental part of the design conception process, helping us to define and scope what we should focus on and when.”
— Aimee Quantrill, Content Design Lead, REKKI