CakeWalk
In the latter half of 2018, I was fortunate to design for the most popular ramen restaurant chain in Seattle, Kizuki Ramen. I was working closely with a fantastic team of engineers to deliver end to end solution to help solve Kizuki's problems.
Company/
Kizuki Ramen
Role /
Designer
Year /
2018
Delight the customer from the very first moment they entered.
June 2018 Kizuki reach out to us about wanting a way to solve their queue problem for there customer. Here is a list of challenges.
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They were concern about losing business due to the customer not wanting to be in a line. They want to walk around the mall while waiting.
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The paper and pen are prunes of error.
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Delightful and intuitive was for the customer to engage with the restaurant without extra attention from restaurant employees.
Scoping a minimal viable product
I explored a few competitor workflows for user stories based on the problems we found. We tried to pare it down to the most essential workflows for an MVP.
As a customer, I want to be able to quickly put myself in the line, see where am I on the line and get a notification when the table is ready.
As a waiter, I want a way to see the queue without having to go back and fort of the restaurant to check on the clipboard. I can manage my line at the same time as doing other works.
From there, we broke down the components that would be require to fulfill these workflows.
Restaurant side
0.1 Bespoke Theme
Kizuki want the app to be part of its dining experience. The look and feel have to "fit" it the restaurant character. The main theme colours are red black and gray. These colour used though out the design of the app.
0.2 Illustrations
Being a Japanese restaurant with higher number of customer that below 30. I though having a Japanese style characters will help Kizuki Queue differentiate themselves from other app.
Restaurant side
0.5 Result
Integrated Kizuki's colour theme and unique character to deliver a bespoke iPad app that fits the brand like a glove. With quirky artwork and intuitive UX paired with powerful wait time prediction algorithms, the customer check-in and seating process is delightfully seamless.
More than 150,000 tickets created and counting
