Service Charge Management

Team

I acted as the design lead for this project and worked alongside a product manager and two platform engineers.

The Goal

There is a common problem with most Point of Sales where operators are not able to customize settings, or if they can, it’s too little or too complicated. One setting in particular is service charges. We were tasked with providing a solution to allow users to easily configure custom service charges.

Comp Analysis

Users & Audience

After speaking with a variety of quick-service and full-service restaurants, we discovered that our target users were Managers and General Managers. 

A key differentiator for this user group was having the ability to make changes to things that affect their sales. This is usually done within our back-end system, which is usually restricted to higher-level restaurant employees.

Design Process

In order to understand the scope and details of this feature, we started out by gathering qualitative data on service charges. Since many of our CX team members having extensive backgrounds in the restaurant and hospitality industry, they were a good place to start. They helped us narrow down our core audience and the best customers to speak with.

After understanding all the user needs we received from our research, we were able to identify their key pain points: they wanted an easy way to build their own service charges from scratch.

We identified the key specs that had to be included in the MVP, then brainstormed all the possible types of service charges and calculation methods. From there, we mapped out all possible user journey flows from a series of criteria necessary to build a service charge.

Testing

We ended up with a question-answer format which went through numerous text changes. Since this was a very text-heavy feature, we concluded that this interface was best viewed on a full-screen desktop. We tested numerous form design iterations, from breaking it apart into sections to an accordion view. We received feedback that users preferred a continuous form that’s entirely visible on screen load.

The biggest challenge was the various directions a user could go based on their answer to specific questions. The product manager and I had to come up with a way to reveal additional questions based on how a user responded. For example, one of the questions for the fee value, if they answer fixed dollar or percent, an additional field displays for the user to input their answer.

There was also an iOS peice which was much less extensive. The Point of Sale operator needed a way to manually add or remove these service charges onto a check. We utilized previously built functionality for adding and removing discounts, which had similar user workflow, but with a different subject matter.

Final Design