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Following on the heels of the award winning Chipotle mobile app, our task to redesign chipotle.com was two-fold: how do we continue the success of the mobile platform while having a distinct .com experience that would be enriched by a larger screen and a whole guacamole load of additional content to augment the experience? Our creation of amazing food photography also had a real chance to shine here and is on full display during the ordering experience. I still don't think another restaurant holds a candle to Chipotle's images.
The mobile app pedigree is where we made our mark and the responsive version of the website continues that legacy by highlighting the beautiful food photography along with the great ordering experience on mobile.
Below is a couple versions of the home page that I explored but we didn't use. There's some ideas here that were way out there and some that were actually carried over and refined for the final version. Please note that these are using some FPO imagery and content!
Catering represents a relatively small but important aspect of Chipotle’s overall sales. At the time the project started, the catering website was using a white labeled, templated system that wasn’t suited for Chipotle’s unique problems. There were complexities in both the overall packages they offered and how to make the choices which that package contains. Ordering catering also has logistical concerns within the company based on local offerings and prices.
The audience for this project was the many various hungry customers that had the need to feed large groups of people. People gather for various reasons and we worked with existing data from Chipotle and other third party research sources. We conducted interviews with people that regularly order catering. We also did extensive competitive analysis of other companies in the space including similar “fast casual” restaurants and websites/services that offer catering ordering as a service (ezCatering, etc).
2 Main Segments:
Business Customer
Social Customer
Based on the research we conducted as well as third party research that we had access to, it was clear that there were two main segments of our catering users. The Business Customer and the Social Customer. This was a great insight that helped us shape our personas and craft our user journeys throughout the process of designing with empathy and user needs.
We decided to look into more detail for the business user as they were by far the majority of the users that order catering. This again divided the user base into another two types of users. The Administrative Assistant and the occasional event order for poeple such as sales executives and trainers.
Creating personas allows us to map certain user behavior to specific types of customers that represent large swaths of users in a generalized way. We chose 4 personas to cover both of the Business users and two different types of Social users that may have more unique types of events for their catering needs.
Each persona has their own needs and desires as they move through the ordering process. Including their needs, they each may use a different device to order on and expectation on delivery/pickup date. By running our personas through this process we gained valuable insight into the different types of ordering processes that we would need to design for.
Part 1: Bringing everything together, we chose to create an interface where the user can select between a Single, Double, or Triple and get a visual representation of the amount and variety of food that each of the different packages contained. To further reinforce the differences, we added descriptive copy with more details to help users make a selection.
While learning about the products that the Catering team offered, we realized that one of the biggest hurdles for the experience would be conveying the different options in a clear and understandable way. We decided to add a selector to the beginning of the process that showed how much each selection would cost on a per person basis as well as visually showing the amount and kind of food that would be included with each choice.
Part 2: The intake process was an important step in the order flow. We needed to obtain these key pieces of information to ensure that the restaurants could logistically fulfill the order. This included number of guests, date & time as well as location because certain items were only available at certain stores throughout the Chipotle network.
Each of the fields were progressively revealed to the user as they filled them in to ensure that the previous information was taken into account for the next choice. For instance, once they've chosen a restaurant and date, the times for that day would be revealed dynamically to show times that were available for that window.
Part 3: The build process for a catering order is the most important part of the process. Our team wanted to make sure that with all the options and requirements that each catering package had, that the user could easily navigate through the page. All while ensuring that the beautiful food imagery was front and center and was still the star of the experience.
Every time a user clicks or taps a selection, it's updated in a few places to visually show the user's progress towards a total package build-out. It was important to also let the user know they could add more of a certain item if they chose to. Subtotal, number of people and progress towards a full order were all easily visible and helped to lead people through the experience of ordering a large amount of food.
While I had left the company before the implementation of the designs, I was able to get some of the data that proves that our digital transformation worked. You can check out the full links for more details.
“In its first quarter earnings report, Chipotle reported a digital sales increase of 100.7 percent compared to the same period last year.”
“Perhaps even more impressive than Chipotle's comparable-restaurant sales recently is the company's accelerating digital sales growth. Digital sales increased 48%, 66%, and 101% year over year in the company's third quarter of 2018, fourth quarter of 2018, and first quarter of 2019, respectively. Even more, digital sales accounted for 16% of first-quarter sales, up from 11% of sales two quarters ago.”
"With digital sales rocketing by 78.3 percent and accounting for 19.6 percent of sales, Chipotle Mexican Grill reported a comparable restaurant sales increase of 13.4 percent for the fourth quarter.”