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Improving the B2B Wholesale Food Ordering Process for Amber Waves Farm
Project Overview
Amber Waves Farm is a working B2B farm with a B2C market and restaurant in Amagansett, New York.
Amber Waves grows vegetables and sells them to local restaurants in New York.
In this case study, I’ll detail the process of improving their Wholesale Ordering site to create a simple, streamlined process for users and Amber Waves Employees.
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How will improving the wholesale ordering process contribute to business goals for Amber Waves?
Stakeholder interviews to understand business goals
We wanted to learn more about the current process, challenges, and business goals from Amber Waves Employees, so we could better understand how to create an effective solution.
We conducted a stakeholder interview with Farm & Wholesale Manager, Isabel Milligan to learn more about business goals, current challenges, and constraints
Key Findings from Interviews
Success Looks Like:
Having one place where all orders exist with consistent formatting to streamline the process of harvesting and delivering
Making it easier and quicker for both farm staff and restaurant chefs to do it all in one place
Current Solutions & Challenges:
Often chefs are sending orders and special requests to Amber Waves via email or text instead of using the website
Orders placed via email and text do not come through in consistent format, making it time consuming to compile into one organized spreadsheet
How will this outcome improve their business?
Efficiency - This would make the ordering, harvesting, and delivering processes much more efficient, saving staff hours of time
Accuracy - Removes the possibility of human error (Isabel missing an email/text or transferring the orders correctly) so clients get accurate orders
Constraints & Requirements:
No big changes to the overall website (staff and customers already know how to use it)
Orders need to be placed in a standardized way to create an efficient order summary
No payment goes through the site (invoices/ACH payments are handled outside of the site)
Understanding User Goals
Next, we utilized secondary research and user interviews to further understand how customers place orders, and their specific goals when doing so
Using secondary research to understand behavior
The biggest challenge for Amber Waves is that orders and requests are sent through texts, emails, and other alternate channels. This makes processing orders difficult and scattered.
We reviewed some text and email correspondence from our client to understand some of the requests being made by chefs and customers.
Interview with Chef Jack
Additionally, we conducted an interview with an Amber Waves Customer to dive deeper into some of the needs and preferences chefs have when placing an order.
We asked about some background, how they place orders, and some of the important aspects of ordering efficiently and accurately.
User Persona
From our research, we were able to define a user persona, highlighting key needs and goals in the wholesale ordering process.
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How might we make placing a wholesale order more faster and more accurate for customers without sacrificing efficiency for Amber Waves?
Designing Solutions
Next, we sketched some potential features that might support both user and business goals, then prioritized features from those sketches to build low-fidelity designs.
I choose to focus on making the ordering process faster and more accurate for chefs to increase site usage so that Amber Waves can get all of their orders in one place and in a consistent format.
Here are a few of the features and concepts that I began working on to support these needs
Creating the option to save orders to increase efficiency for chefs and ensure Amber Waves gets orders in a timely fashion
Adding a special requests feature to improve user confidence in order accuracy as well as create a more consistent ordering process for Amber Waves.
Highlighting Key Features
Next, I created high-fidelity designs for these features to show the details of their functionality, and how they might support business and user goals in the ordering process.
Creating Saved Orders
To help chef’s submit their orders to Amber Waves more efficiently, I designed a feature for chefs to create saved orders for frequently needed ingredients that can be quickly reordered or customized.
I believe this would make it easier and quicker for chefs to submit their orders and would improve the process for Amber Waves by obtaining all orders in one place and with consistent formatting.
Creating Saved Orders
I also added an feature for chefs to select available special requests for specific items, which would help chefs feel more confident in the accuracy of their order. Special requests would be set by Amber Waves so that chefs could only make requests for options that are actually available.
Enabling available special request fields would make it easier for chefs to make special requests with confidence of that the order will be accurate and would help Amber Waves get consistent order details.
Next Steps
My next step would be to conduct a usability test to determine ease of use of the new features as well as get more information from users on whether these features help solve their pain points.
I’d also want to explore some features to solve for other pain points that came up in user interviews, like implementing a text reminder with a link to the website to help chefs submit their orders before the cutoff time.
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