Context

Customers of the office canteen at a large conglomerate in India continued to face points of frustration, including an exclusively physical display of menu options in the canteen, food running out upon arrival, and lack of healthy choices. In addition, the department responsible for canteen operation received feedback forms with seemingly contradictory information.

Problem

We looked at how might we improve the office canteen, and what did “improve” mean to consumers.

My Role

I worked with a partner who was also employed with the same company. I was engaged in all steps of the human centered design process, including interviews, qualitative synthesis, ideating, and prototyping.

Discovery and Insights

We interviewed employees (8 interviewees including extreme users), the canteen operator, the canteen cashier, office staff, and we reviewed canteen feedback forms. Through this process, we realized that the canteen operator had planned the menu on Saturday for the entire week ahead. This was a crucial piece of information. We furthermore crystallized our research into six common themes: choices, efficiency, transparency, space, social interaction, and sustainability.

Based on these six themes, we held an ideation session.

Prototype Testing

Based on our ideation session, we combined a few ideas into two prototypes: an online menu, and a method for menu idea crowdsourcing.

Using the online menu, we were testing for transparency, efficiency, and choice. From the online menu, some of the learnings included the fact that real-time menu item availability updates were secondary, and that the website needed to be accessible on work computers because at the time, Wordpress was blocked. However, the feedback from this prototype was not as revelatory. If we were to redo this, we would have tested with more users.

The second prototype was testing for choice. We put a large pad in the canteen and told people they could put down what they wanted on the menu and the canteen operators would take their views into consideration.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that this was incredibly popular and the list was filled in minutes. This showed that people were invested in what they were eating and what the canteen could offer them.

Challenges

There were some barriers regarding language. Furthermore, because we volunteered to do this project for free, the department accepted our help without necessarily buying into human centered design. So, explaining the design process took a bit more time than if we had a client who already had an open mind to the process.

Results

After I left the company, an online menu was implemented for the canteen. Furthermore, even though we did not have the chance to prototype this idea, the company installed a pick-up window for people to order their food in advance.