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How Strategic Design Increased Platform Uptime by 12%

Transforming venue staff behaviour through feature enhancement and cross-functional collaboration to reduce revenue loss

A smartphone and a tablet displaying a management app interface with options to update the status of a section, including available, unavailable, and remove alcohol, with duration choices from 15 minutes to until tomorrow.

Overview

Project Details

Year
2023 for me&u

Team
1 Lead product designer (me)
1 Product designer
1 Product manager
1 Tech lead
5 Engineers

Tools
Figma
Hotjar
Google Analytics
Google Forms
Linear
Notion

me&u is a hospitality tech service which empowers a venue’s guests to skip the long queue via mobile ordering. The main business model is a commission on each sale through the platform, with the biggest venues having high alcoholic beverage sales.

However, venue staff were manually disabling the platform during peak trading hours, causing significant revenue loss. Some staff would even forget to re-enable me&u, leading to entire days of lost revenue.

The core problem

Staff lacked granular control to manage alcohol service compliance, forcing them to disable entire sections when concerned about RSA (Responsible Service of Alcohol) violations.

The solution

Expanded the existing disable functionality to include management of individual table beacons, allowing venue staff to take preventative and reactive measures against violation risks.

The Impact

✅ 12% reduction in manual platform deactivations

✅ Enhanced RSA compliance tools increased staff confidence in usage of me&u

✅ Prioritised backlog of concepts to further reduce disable actions

The Design Process

Part 1 of the double diamond design process

Why are venues turning us off?

The data initially supplied by the Business Intelligence team was telling us the ‘what’ but not ‘why’. I needed to understand staff’s motivations for taking excessive disable actions, as well as identify solutions to encourage me&u to remain in operation for the intended time.

Phase 1 - Research & discovery

Data analytics: Count of disabled actions taken over the course of a day, for past 90 days.

Research Strategy & Approach

Led comprehensive discovery across 2 user segments using mixed methods:

Quantitative

  • Analytics review

  • Survey of top-disabling venues with 75 participants from 30% response rate

Qualitative

  • Concept validation with venue staff

  • Group workshop with Account Managers

  • 1:1 interviews with Customer Service and the Support Team managers

Secondary

  • Competitive analysis

  • Support ticket review

  • Heuristic evaluation of existing flows

A collection of presentation slides and diagrams related to business analysis, innovation, and strategy. The slides include topics such as background and plan, problem statements, ideation workshop, brainstorming sessions, customer insights, question trees, opportunity solution trees, investigation methods, competitive analysis, and POS issues.

Figjam screenshot: Overview of the master file for the discovery portion of the project

Key Research Insights

  • Overwhelmed Operations

    Venues disable when demand exceeds order capacity

  • Delivery Challenges

    Staff struggle running orders in crowded spaces and locating roaming vertical drinkers, leading to wastage and poor experience

  • Staffing Shortages

    Insufficient staff to handle digital orders

  • RSA Compliance Fear

    Staff lack the ability to monitor, control or deny service to individuals ordering through me&u. So they resort to disabling entire sections.

  • Technical Friction

    System issues with both POS and me&u create "I'll fix it later" mentality

Crowded indoor event with string lights, hanging decorations, food stalls, and a stage with a musician performing, people seated at tables enjoying food and drinks

Additional Insights

  • We found that venues are not reporting the right disable-action reasons. This was due to UI defaults, and their desire to avoid being contacted by me&u Support team. Improving the way we capture this data will result in more meaningful and accurate insights.

  • Any time staff has to manually update me&u, is an opportunity for them to take the easy path and disable us instead. We need to provide tools that are intuitive and work in supporting their needs with less inputs.

  • Features like wait times and services are being utilised by some venues to avoid disabling, but these features don’t meet the majorities need effectively enough.

  • Several reasons start to overlap and emphasise each other. We’ve attempted to isolate the core issues, and divide between opportunities that can be tackled at smaller scale.

Critical Discovery

Internal teams believed that the number one reason was technical issues with me&u. So it was surprising that not one of the survey respondents cited this as a reason for disabling me&u.

In fact 55.6% of venues cited RSA compliance as their primary reason for disabling, yet account managers had ranked this as only the 4th concern.

This was extremely helpful in ensuring we weren’t just reacting to the Sales department’s requirements.

Survey Results: The multi-select survey showed venues cite RSA compliance as top reason for disabling

Part 2 of the double diamond design process 
Phase 2 - Strategic Prioritisation & Stakeholder Alignment

Where to next?

With such a range of insights, our new challenge was choosing which problem spaces were worth tackling. While many felt important to solve, we needed to be ruthless to ensure we stayed on track to move the needle of our north star metric.

Opportunity Landscape

Leveraged an opportunity solution tree to communicate the breadth of problems and their interconnected relationships. This included high-level solutions, which aided the squad in using RICE scoring to narrow the solutions we’d present to the stakeholders.

Opportunity solution tree: Captures the breadth of reasons ‘why’ and opportunities

Prioritisation Framework

Facilitated prioritisation session with PM, Tech Lead and stakeholders using BRICE scoring method to evaluate:

  • User impact severity and frequency

  • Revenue potential and strategic alignment

  • Engineering effort and technical feasibility

  • Implementation complexity and risk

Prioritisation results: Secured alignment on top 3 areas of opportunity

Why RSA Compliance Won

  • Low-hanging fruit
    41% of CLOSED actions affected single sections only as opposed to entire venue. A strong indicator that those close actions are related to RSA concerns.

  • High confidence
    Clear user validation through survey data

  • Technical feasibility
    Extension of existing disable functionality

  • Business impact
    Direct correlation to revenue protection

Part 3 of the double diamond design process 
Phase 3 - LO-FI SOLUTION DESIGN

Finding the best way

At this stage, the top 3 initiatives were split between me and the fellow product designer on the squad. We still collaborated heavily as our flows crossed over.

Cross-Functional Ideation

Facilitated ideation session with squad and BI team members, as well as key account managers, exploring:

"How might we prevent alcohol service violations while keeping me&u operational?"

Ideation output: Ideas conceptualised, shared and voted

Ideas ranged from venue-initiated to preventative measures:

  • User account restrictions

  • In app sobriety testing

  • Customised product suggestions on subsequent orders

  • Volume-based ordering limits for either user or table

  • Winner: Turning off the sale of alcoholic beverages only

  • Winner: Individual beacon disable control

Design Decision Rationale

  • Leveraged familiar user workflows (higher adoption)

  • Extended existing product architecture (faster development)

  • Addressed validated user needs with high confidence

This solution may have seemed obvious given our initial research findings. However, it was important to bring the squad along on the journey and to practice divergent thinking when it comes to problem-solving.

Initial Designs

  1. Mapped all possible scenarios

  2. Created low-fidelity wireframes to explore various executions

  3. Collaborated with engineering early to ensure feasibility

  4. Tested low-fi designs

  5. Facilitated prioritisation of user stories via MoSCow method

Scenario 1: Intoxicated party asked to leave and pending orders refunded

Scenario 2: As a preventative measure, staff disable a party’s ability to order alcoholic beverages

Testing & Refinement

  1. Used gorilla testing in-house to validate the positioning of the beacon management

  2. Conducted usability testing with 5 internal participants (due to high confidence)

  3. Iterated based on feedback

Some concepts were descoped early during this stage to streamline the delivery. I had believed it would be beneficial for staff to see and easily navigate to any open orders on a beacon. This would help them monitor beverage consumption, and cancel/refund orders if necessary.

  • Wireframe exploration

    One of many fast iterations exploring optimal beacon discovery and multi-select

  • Wireframe exploration

    Another lean exploration, this time using a grid layout and different positioning of the select all functionality

  • Dashboard showing sections with their service types, beacon status, and section status. Sections A, B, and C are active with taking orders, while Section D is offline.

    Flow Screen 1 - Sections stay the same. Single beacon selection revealed as user initiates a disable action.

  • A software interface for disabling a section called Section B, asking why it is being disabled, with options related to RSA compliance, operational challenges, system issues, or other reasons. It also asks who should be affected, with options for the entire section or a specific customer. There are 'Dismiss' and 'Next' buttons at the bottom.

    Flow Screen 2 - Modal view where staff is asked reason via progressive disclosure. If selecting RSA concern, then prompted to choose for entire section or individual.

  • A digital screen shows a menu for adjusting sale or order sections, with options to close orders, remove alcohol, food, or all drinks, and select a duration for the removal process, including 15 mins, 30 mins, 45 mins, 1 hour, or until tomorrow, with navigation buttons labeled 'Back' and 'Next'.

    Flow Screen 3 - Staff makes choice to only prevent the sale of alcohol, or to remove all service.

  • A digital interface screen showing a table selection menu with options to disable beacons for specific tables. Highlighted tables are in dark blue, and others are in light gray. There are navigation buttons labeled 'Back' and 'Disable selection' at the bottom.

    Flow Screen 4 - Finally user selects the beacons from a list of all in that section. This option wasn’t chosen due to hidden visibility of beacon status, and crowded visuals given the size of some sections.

Step 4 in the double diamond process. 
Phase 4 - IMPLEMENTING HI-FIS

Time to make it pretty optimise the design

This platform had long been neglected. Now was a great opportunity to work with our front-end engineer to introduce more consistency and improve accessability of the platform.

Key UX Decisions

  1. Information architecture
    Consolidated beacon management under rebranded "Floor Manager"

  2. Alcohol-only restrictions
    Preserved guest experience while enabling compliance

  3. Prominent "All Sections" control
    Repositioned to top of list to improve discoverability; usage data and Hotjar session replays showed users were missing the bulk action when placed below the fold.

  4. Alphabetical sorting of sections and beacons
    Improved task completion speed

Before

Before: Original Sections page used to manage me&u’s availability at section level only

After

After: Redesigned Floor Manager page introducing individual beacons and removal of alcohol from service

After: Guest experience on the me&u Order App. Leveraged existing patterns and screens to minimise developer effort.

After: Guest experience on the me&u Order App. Leveraged existing patterns and screens to minimise developer effort.

UI Enhancements

Utilised the page redesign as an opportunity to address legacy UI inconsistencies and promote adoption of Design System components. Standardised pill select and grouping patterns from the Availability tab to improve usability and reduce cognitive load. Additionally, refined lexicon for greater consistency.

Before: Original Availability page which served as inspiration for redesign to have consistent UI patterns

Engineering Collaboration

  • Created comprehensive design system components

  • Conducted design QA throughout development (4 improvement areas identified)

  • Established mobile-responsive standards for venue management tools

  • Participated in group QA of all functionality at end of development cycle

Prioritising Mobile-friendly

Originally Venman was to always be operated on a tablet, so a mobile first approach was mostly ignored. However Google Anayltics data showed that despite the lack of proper responsiveness, users still accessed the service on their mobile devices.

While not a statistically significant number, we had heard users ask for this, and I was able to convince the team as part of the redesign to make the components responsive.

Given how critical it is to adhere to those RSA legislations, having the ability to manage the beacons immediately from pocket encouraged higher feature adoption.

After: Updated Floor Manager page, now mobile friendly

Launch & Change Management

Communication of Updates

Collaborated with PM to introduce product showcases for internal teams after learning account managers weren't aware of platform changes. This improved:

  • Cross-departmental awareness

  • Team morale through appreciation visibility

  • Feature adoption through better communication

The internal showcase was followed by a product update email to all our venue managers, combined with other squad releases.

Launch

Because the functionality for disabling beacons was an extension of a pre-existing feature, we felt confident in launching directly to our entire user base.

Monitoring

For this size of feature, we simply relied on Account Managers to gather post-launch feedback as part of their regular venue check-ins.

Results & Business Impact

Quantitative Success

  • 12% reduction in CLOSED disable actions (primary success metric)

  • Single-section only closures: 41% → 5% (indicating successful RSA solution)

  • Improved operational hours directly correlating to revenue protection

What I Learned

  • Have the Product and Business Intelligence team collaborate earlier in each other’s process to build shared ownership of hypotheses.

  • Use tools like opportunity trees to spark alignment and guide future work. If using a new theory or asset for the first time, do a dry run with design team members prior.

  • Ensure data tells a clear, actionable story that can be used to inform product decisions. Otherwise it is unnecessary friction for the user. And agree on a cadence to review said data.

Strategic Impact

  • Market leadership: Then competitor Mr Yum reprioritised their roadmap to feature match our solution

  • Account manager feedback: Venues "loving the new changes"

  • Enhanced venue confidence in RSA compliance management