Project Summary
Strategies: UX Researcher
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Tools: Figma, Procreate
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Timeline: February 15- Current
InWhisk is a kitchen display system designed specifically to aid the expeditor, the role in the kitchen that connects the front of house to the back of house.
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High Level Goals:​
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Research the expeditor and understand their role in the kitchen
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Create a prototype with the goal increase efficiency and accuracy in the kitchen by improving communication channels between the runners and cooks.
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Provide a high-level flow and supporting wireframes
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Conduct industry research to ensure product feasibility.
Methodology
1
Expeditor Research
Field Studies and Interviews
2
Software Research
Demos, reviews, and surveys
3
Market Research
Business studies and interviews
4
MVP/UI
Features and Company branding
5
User Testing
User studies based on prototype
6
Risks and Financials
Projected financial statements and closing thoughts
Finding the Problem
In a restaurant food expeditors serve as the link between the kitchen staff and the customers. They are responsible for the smooth flow of orders and efficient delivery of service. They communicate with the waitstaff and chefs, and they inspect the quality of the dishes served. However, the various responsibilities can often make the job overwhelming which could negatively impact the flow of the restaurant and a customer’s dining experience. For example, in a survey of 100 negative reviews, 66% of the reviews site foods arrive at incorrect temperatures or wrong dishes entirely, which is the fault of the expeditor.
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The expeditor is widely cited to be one of the most high-stress roles in the kitchen and can make or break a kitchen's flow and success. To create a software solution to aid the expeditor, first I needed to better understand the main role of the expeditor and the complexities of their job.
Field Study
In order to better understand the problem at hand, reached out to a New York city restaurant to shadow their expeditor. I was invited to step into the Kitchen at Tribeca Grill to speak to their expeditor and watch him work first hand.
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Tribeca Grill is a traditional American kitchen that has 5 stations: cold side, fryer, pasta, sauté, grill. They expeditor will gather the tickets printed from the POS system and place them in the ticket line, shown in the second picture. The expeditor has to look at at each item on the ticket, call the item to the chef at each corresponding station at the proper time. The expeditor also has non-ticket and timing related tasks, such has putting out plates for the chefs, finish the presentation for finished plates, folding napkins, and generally keeping the kitchen clear and clean.
There are 5 different types of tickets an expeditor has to be mindful of: 1 course, 2 course, large party, bar, and delivery. Each of these types of tickets need to be processed and timed differently to ensure ideal restaurant flow. Additionally, the expeditor need to consider and inform the kitchen staff of allergies, modifications, and split meals. When an expeditor reads on of the tickets above, they need to ask several questions, like when they should fire each item so they all finish on time, when they should fire the second course so the customer has enough time to finish their appetizers, how many items are currently being fired and can they combine any fires to save time? Additionally, they have to run through this thought process and do this mental math for every single ticket that comes through the kitchen. For a busy kitchen like Tribeca Grill, that can mean keeping track of 43 tickets in a 15 minute span.
Ethnographic Interviews
On top of the field study, I wanted to interview multiple expeditors that use different KDS and POS software's to ensure that my findings weren't problems specific to this certain restaurant or software. My main findings were:
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Communication
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Heavy reliance on verbal communication to deliver instructions throughout service
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For restaurants with digitized tickets, only the expeditor has the screen display in view
Timing & Pacing
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Timing is the most important concept in the kitchen
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Meals are timed out by the servers and expeditor based on the pace of diners
Responsibilities
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Expeditor has both timing based and non-timing based duties to perform
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Will assist in firing food and perform tasks to assist in food presentation
Expeditor Role
Persona
Mark Chavez is an expeditor in a New York City fine-dining scene. He has been an expeditor for 4 years after getting promoted from his chef duties. He has worked in professional kitchens for years, but still struggles with the memorization and mental math necessary daily to complete his job. He leaves his job feeling drained everyday because of the mentally taxing work and if any errors occur he wll be the first to be reprimanded.
About:
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38 years old
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New York City
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Expeditor for 4 years
Pain Points:
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Overwhelming amount of responsibilities
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Struggles to coordinate orders while multitasking
Goals:
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Ensuring the efficient flow of orders from the waiters to the kitchen
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Ensuring orders are being prepared with the correct priority
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Assisting in the final preparation of dishes
Needs:
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Assistance in organizing and directing kitchen staff
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Assistance in calculating firing times
Mark Padilla
Competitor Analysis
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The KDS is typically offered by the POS software
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POS systems hardly display information regarding their KDS. Focus is more towards front of house.
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None of these KDS systems are used to aid the expeditor, the most important role of the kitchen
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None include a comprehensive timeline of what is going on in the kitchen.
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PreciTaste is the most similar to the features I want to include, but it has only exclusively been used in fast-food restaurants and don't use live customer insights to integrate task planning
Wire Frames
High Fidelity Wire Frames
Timeline view:
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Using order tracking technology, it will automatically schedule tasks that are necessary to keep the kitchen running. For example, the system will track how many orders of chicken have been cooked and using predictive AI, will automatically schedule when the cook should start marinating the next set of chicken.
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Expeditor can easily drag combine certain meals to inform the cooks that they should be prepared at the same time or drag tasks to change when they occur.
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From this page, the expeditor can call out each dish when they need to be prepared if the kitchen doesn’t have a KDS for each station.
Ticket view:
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Similar to current restaurant KDS systems because it mirrors how physical tickets used to be sent to the kitchen.
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The tickets will be automatically split by course, indicated by the fraction at the bottom of the ticket. Each ticket has the planned arrival of each course at the bottom of the ticket which is automatically calculated by our system based on ideal pacing, time it takes for each dish to be cooked, and overall how busy the kitchen is.
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Sometimes in a kitchen, there are times when you want to push an order ahead of another order. If that’s the case, the expeditor can click the ticket to change the time for the order and the system with automatically recalculate the ticket’s start time or finish the ticket.
Order and Fire view:
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The final page in the expeditor’s KDS is the order and fire view. The fire number, on the left of the dish in pink, indicates how many of each dish are currently being cooked or “fired”, while the order number indicates what dishes are in the queue to be fired.
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This page is useful for the expeditor so they can know at all times what is being worked on and what is coming up. They can look at this page to know what plates and sides need to be prepared for each dish coming up.
User Testing
Reflection
Overall, my capstone project was extremely rewarding and I'm excited to continue my revisions for to enter NYU's entrepreneurship submission. I knew I really wanted to focus on conducting thorough research for this project and conducting my own field study and interviews was beyond insightful.
I was able to learn an immense amount about how commercial kitchen's operate and my user testing with restaurant employees gave me a lot fo great feedback that I plan to consider with my UI revision.
All in all, I thought my capstone was a fulfilling project and was a great way for senior students to customize their curriculum to their concentrations or interests. I'm looking forward to transferring all the technical skills learned from NYU's IDM major to my future profession in UX design.