Aloha Kitchen Back Office Part 1
Updating an Existing Legacy Product: Stations and Devices
Role Product Designer, March 2024 - February 2025
Team 2 UX Designers, 1 UX Researcher, 4 Product Managers & Product Owners, 20+ Developers
Background
Aloha Kitchen Back Office allows users to drive improvement of kitchen productivity, reduction of kitchen waste and efficiency in completing orders and/or deliveries. In this project, I was tasked to conduct research of our competitors, interview internal subject matter experts and review existing NCR Voyix solutions in order to combine our two legacy solutions and design a modern approach to automate and streamline operations in regards to kitchen configurations of stations, devices and routing groups. This case study explores the design of configuring kitchen stations to back-of-house operations. The case study exploring configuration of routing groups can be found in Part 2.
Research & Identifying Customer Pain Points
In addition to doing some external competitive research, it was imperative to review our existing NCR Voyix solutions—Aloha Coud and Aloha Essentials—to learn more about the needs of both our small restaurant owners and larger, enterprise level customers. This research entailed interviewing internal stakeholders on our sales teams and studying our current user interfaces.
We learned that setting up the kitchen back office usually involved 6 steps and adding kitchen devices were included within the process of creating routing groups*. While this alone would not necessarily create a bad user experience, customers often found configuration of their kitchen to be challenging due to the complex navigation and confusing terminology.
For example, in order to add a kitchen device, users would go to Kitchen Routing Setup > Add Kitchen Device, and if a user wants to view a list of all the devices, users would have to go to My Account > My Devices. The term “devices” was being used interchangeably to describe both the hardware devices used in the restaurant and the stations the devices were located in.
*A routing group is a path in which an order is routed through the different stations in the kitchen to be prepped, cooked, plated or packaged.
Solution
The solution? Design a more intuitive navigation by recategorizing the content and separating the concept of kitchen devices —the hardware such as the kitchen display and printers—from the kitchen station—where food is prepped, cooked, plated or packaged.
The second solution was to create a separate process for adding kitchen stations and devices from the creation of routing groups. The stations page consists of a table of all the stations in the restaurant and the ability to add, edit, deactivate and delete stations:
Create station flows:
Edit station flows:
Delete and deactivate station flows:
Deactivation and deletion of stations led to issues where routing groups no longer had a station that food was being routing through, so logic was built into the system to ensure that whenever a user chose any of these actions, they were forewarned of the consequences.
Results & Takeaways
Establish a clear hierarchy. By reorganizing the content into three main kitchen configuration processes, users were able to find what they needed more quickly than before.
Seek to understand and be gentle during that process. Understanding an existing product is incredibly important in ultimately understanding the problem and finding a solution. But sometimes when you ask others questions about their work, you will often reveal holes in the product and people become immediately defensive. In projects where I’m asked to update or “modernize” a product, I’m very careful not to intimidate people with my “why” questions and instead frame my questions as an opportunity for everyone to get involved in improving our product for further success.