About habitat by honestbee
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Launched in October 2018, habitat by honestbee is a beautiful, physical extension of the honestbee brand. It provide tech-enabled convenience, value and quality through food, online and offline. It is a unique combination of a full supermarket, speciality grocer, dining and interactive lifestyle destination. In this thoughtful space, one can expect a multi-sensorial food experience that nourishes, educates and inspires. It was designed for customers to get their groceries and meals efficiently but also linger and enjoy the experience.
Powered by honestbee technology, customers can use their honestbee app to enter habitat, to browse more than twenty thousands of products and to purchase grocery or meals cashless.
Powered by honestbee technology, customers can use their honestbee app to enter habitat, to browse more than twenty thousands of products and to purchase grocery or meals cashless.
Image credit: honestbee
What is Merchant POS?
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Merchant POS is a tablet-based application for 15 food & beverage merchants in habitat to take orders, to manage orders and to charge orders from customers.
Merchant POS connects with printers in able to immediately print out order detail receipt for meal preparation, it also connects with a wireless scanner which could scan customer's beePass (personal QR code) on honestbee app to achieve cashless transaction.
Design process
Role: UX, UI, Interaction Design
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1. Research
To better understand how general POS system works, I arranged a few researches and interviews:
• Competitor analysis including Square, iChef, Loyverse POS, etc..
• Interviewed current POS system users to get the insights about how POS system can help their business.
• Interviewed a retail expert to see what values we can add on to our POS system.
I got some great insights from the actions above:
• The inventory management is crucial, and it should be reflected on the POS interface spontaneously so we don’t take orders that can not be fulfilled. For kitchen staff they should be able to set the available quantity of each menu items before open or during sales.
• The printer is essential for server and kitchen staff to better manage the whole flow and orders.
• The text size on order detail receipt for kitchen should be larger for faster recognition.
• The free text input and price adjustment for each ordered item is important. It could help with variety of unexpected customization or help server to take any note that may improve services.
• We should include some popular combos, set meals as one default menu item to decrease time spent on taking orders.
2. Finding the interaction patterns
In the beginning, we had tons of ideas about the dining experiences within the habitat, to help the team visualize the overall scenarios, I drew a few storyboards to present the possible story lines. Also a service blueprint was came out from it, we can see the interactions between customers, merchants, and backroom staffs clearly. This would greatly help the team to define the features we need on Merchant POS in the coming future.
Examples of storyboard
Service blueprint for F&B experiences
3. Defining features on Merchant POS
Based on the results and feedbacks from the previous step, we can conclude the following major user stories were must-have for Merchant POS when habitat launched:
1. Current orders – Merchant takes orders from customers over the counter. Merchant confirms order with customer and then checkout.
2. Fresh dining – Customer can pick fresh meat or seafood in habitat and take it to the restaurant for fresh dining.
3. Open orders – Merchant can accept/ reject new orders from in-app ordering customer; merchant can manage prep now orders till order completion.
4. Completed orders – Merchant can view all completed orders in order history.
5. Menu item inventory management – Merchant can do menu item inventory management when item is out of stock or has limited stock, it would reflect on POS to prevent overselling.
6. Printer settings – Merchant can choose receipt printers to print out receipt.
7. Login & logout – Only the owner of the merchant can access to Merchant POS.
4. Wireframing
After all the information was collected, I started to draw wireframes of the happy flows thus we can visualize the possible UI element placements and function steps easily.
We also held a feedback session with stakeholders, PM and engineers to quickly gather their opinions and to tweak design later on.
5. Hi-fidelity UI & flow
I put all the detailed scenarios and design specs in this phase including happy flow, error handling and exception handling. It was much easier to communicate with PM and engineers based on the actual UI designs.
As to designers, I put those screens on prototyping tools like inVision or Marvel to check the overall look and feel, and to simulate real interactions on device.
6. Demo & testing
When the Merchant POS MVP was released, we held a demonstration session in the office to simulate the real-world ordering experiences in habitat and to examine all the responses from the system were in right place. In addition, we mark down all the flaws for future enhancements.
7. Continuous on-site testing and new features
To continuous improve our POS system, we collected feedbacks from merchants, product owner and customers during the trial run and after official opening of habitat. Here's some projects we did to meet business goals and technical requirements when habitat was launched:
• Support multiple stores ordering in one account
• Capture service recovery/ wastage
• Hide out of stock items on consumer app
• Support store-level printer settings
