Panera catering
user research + design iterations
Goals
Bring the current digital Catering experience in-line with the retail experience
Understand digital requirements of catering users
Abstract
When most people think of Panera Bread, they think of half-salad half-sandwich options and the culinary wonder that is the broccoli cheddar soup. For those in the corporate world, Panera appears with some regularity at conferences and large meetings as well as during the regular weekly lunch rush.
Revenue from Panera Catering contributes to a significant number of the company's overall profits, despite having a fraction of the number of users. Unsurprisingly, when digital sales for retail passed $1 billion, the digital experience team was asked to "work their magic" on the digital catering platform as well.
User research
Current Understanding
Ongoing market research showed that the primary drivers of revenue in Panera Catering are executive assistants and pharmaceutical salespeople. Given the sensitive nature of our relationships with our catering customers, my team chose to start our user research informally, by asking the executive assistants of the CEO to test out our interview process before interviewing actual catering customers.
We also reached out to and interviewed sales reps and assistants that do not use Panera catering, as a way to understand which gaps Panera is unable to fulfill.
Goals
For all users, our goal was to understand their current experience with catering in general, with Panera Catering if applicable, and how digital ordering fits into their lives. If users had experience with Panera Catering, we ran them through a short usability test to understand how they use the site.
Personas
We determined that we had three different personas, defined less by their job roles and more by the way that they interact with catering companies, their comfort with digital platforms, and by how high the stakes are for each catering event.
A fourth persona was included towards the end of our research, when we realized that there was a non-customer user of the catering platform--specifically, a Panera Catering sales rep.
Persona 1: Jose
Jose is a sales rep who uses orders catering every time he has a meeting with a group of doctors. These lunch or breakfast meeting are typically short but very focused--they need to go perfectly if he wants to close a deal.
He is always on-the-go and traveling, meaning he is only able to sit down at his computer either before 9am or after 5pm. He appreciates that he can order online 24/7. However, he always orders from a familiar café and makes sure to maintain a relationship with the catering manager.
"People always remember bad food…and that means they aren't thinking about what I'm selling them."
Jose was the "target" user for the initial iteration of the redesigned catering website. We plotted his experience on a user journey and determined that the speed of the ordering experience was a significant pain point in his busy life.
Persona 2: Diane
Diane is an office manager with decades of experience. She is responsible for ensuring that everything in the office runs smoothly, and will occasionally help out planning large meetings for the C-suite and other executives.
She orders catering from a range of places depending on the type of event. Catered meetings can range from informal workshops to vendor meetings to presentations to the board.
Diane almost never uses online ordering. She only orders from vendors that she trusts and has vetted personally.
"I've been burned before. Now I always pick up the phone, no matter what the order is for."
Diane was unique because she was the opposite of our target user. We recognized that there were going to be users we could never reach, but we also realized that we didn't want a bad experience to turn our Joses into Dianes. We plotted out her user journey through a failed online ordering experience to determine exactly where she "got burned".
Personas 3 + 4: Alina & David
Alina is a Panera Catering sales rep, whose responsibilities include converting call-in users like Diane to digital customers by helping them setup and place catering orders on their own. David is a Panera Catering expert--he routinely orders online and even knows the best tricks for getting the most out of his order.
Though neither persona is the "target" user, we wanted to ensure that we still designed for them. Alina can convert more Dianes if she has an easier time explaining the digital platform to her customers. David is our star customer--any changes that we make to improve Jose's or Diane's experiences cannot have a negative impact on David's experience.
Findings
Trust
One of the most impactful revelations from our research was the level of trust that users needed to feel in order to be comfortable placing a catering order. Nearly all of our users had established some kind of personal relationship with the catering managers and would not order from an unknown entity. In some instances, our users would even check the schedules of their most-trusted catering managers before scheduling a meeting, to ensure that the catering order is successful.
Research Impact
When we presented our research to the catering SVPs, we were informed that they were about to kick-off an initiative to restrict catering deliveries to a specific region around a café. Users would not be able to rely on their favorite café, but would instead be limited to whatever café was assigned to them. The groundwork for the initiative had been based on budgets and resource optimization. Our research was the first time they heard the user's voice. Ultimately, the initiative was put on hold until additional research could be done.
During follow-up interviews, we asked our users what they would do if they were unable to select which café their order came from. Most replied that they'd simply call or text their trusted catering manager and forgo the online platform entirely. When asked what they would do if that café was unable to deliver to them, all of our users said that they'd go with a different vendor that they trusted rather than use a different Panera café.
After that round of research, the initiative was halted until further notice.
Bundles
In addition to user interviews, we also conducted a round of stakeholder interviews to understand the business goals, limitations, and technical challenges of this particular project. We found that most of the stakeholders believed that ordering could be improved by offering users "bundles," though they varied on what these bundles would look like. Our user research showed that users were ordering in a consistent pattern--bagels always meant coffee, sandwiches always meant cookies--but individual users had different ways of hacking the system to get exactly what they want. They also had different ways of understanding quantity.
Given that all of our users struggled with grouped items, we started our designs by trying to tackle the quantity and "bundle" problem.
Design
Low Fidelity
We focused our initial designs around the core userflows of:
Starting an Order
Navigating to a Product Detail Page
Customizing a Bundle
Despite the active nature of our core personas, we found that our users preferred to place catering orders on their work laptops or tablets. Therefore, we began our designs with a desktop-focused mindset. Mobile iterations were included in the mid-fidelity design state.
Future Work
Unfortunately, this project was put on-hold in the middle of our mid-fidelity testing. Our next steps were to finish testing our mid-fidelity wireframes for flow, and then begin applying our design system components to as many elements as possible.
As the designer who constructed the bulk of the retail design system, my role would be to ensure that the overarching Panera design system stayed up-to-date with any added catering components.
We were also going to conclude our discussions with the development teams on how to structure the back-end to match our proposed userflows.