2019 Restaurant Success Report
Toast Inc.
I developed an interactive landing-page that visualizes current diner and restaurant relationships
An industry report that defines a successful restaurant experience from start to finish. The Restaurant Success Report was a journey in disecting data from restaurant professionals and guests exploring the relationship between restaurant best practices and diner preferences.
Timeline
4 Week Exploration
2 Week Build
My Role
Dev Lead
Tools
Themes
Data Visualization
The Problem
Restauranteurs have different approaches to creating fulfilling experiences for their guests. With increasing competition and growing risk it's crucial for restaurant owners to understand what draws customers back to their restaurant and how they can attract new customers to grow their business. However, many restaurant owners are too busy or dont have the means to ask diners outside of their customer base. Thus this is where Toast comes in.
The Solution
The team I was a part of was tasked with collecting survey responses from diners and restauranteurs across the United States and to aggregate their responses into an interactive learning experience to educate restaurant owners on the current trends in the restaurant industry as well as inform them about changing diner expectations.
Goals
Make the landing page and downloadable content informative.
Make it fun.
My Role
I was the lead developer creating the interactive landing page. I collaborated closely with our design leads and content leads to disect and refine the user experience ensuring that the correct message was conveyed using the appropriate graphs.
Development Process
01. - Analyze Research Insights
After analyzing over 2,000 responses from restauranteurs and diners, we discovered 3 key findings.
Managing Operating Costs and Investing in Staff Is Critical
Restaurant professionals ranked high operating and food costs and hiring staff as their top challenges to running a restaurant, with 52% citing high operating and food costs and 51%citing hiring staff. Training staff came in third with 35% of restaurateurs selecting it as a top challenge.
Your Product Needs to Be as Good As Your Marketing
72% of guests said quality of food was important. 65% of restaurant professionals agreed, but they ranked value (i.e. well-priced menus) as the next most important criteria. Guests, however, ranked taste and flavor preferences higher.
Guest Technology Is Booming
Guests listed wifi availability, online reservations, and consumer ordering programsas restaurant technologies most important to their guest experience. Alternatively, restaurant professionals listed gift card programs, online ordering programs, and wifi availability as restaurant technologies most important to their businesses.
02. - Determine the Format for Supporting Interactions
With the key take aways from the survey determined, it was time to decide how to best convey the results. We decided to break down the message into 6 main supporting interactions that helped convey the factors that effect a restaurant's success and provide an engaging learning experience. The six main interactions included:
A map displaying the city locations for our responses and the level success for restaurants in those associated cities.
An interactive bar chart showing the percentage of people that ranked each category in their top 3 challenges.
A bubble chart revealing how many restaurants tackle training their staff.
A drag-n-drop interactive question allowing users to rank the importance of different criteria when choosing what / where to eat at a restaurant in a given week. The user can guess how the average diner and restauranteur answered and then reveal the correct ranking given the responses to our survey.
A stacked horizontal bar chart revealing how survey participants expressed the importance of a set of restaurant technologies to the guest expereience.
A mulitple choice question evaluating the types of rewards for loyalty programs aimed at retaining customers.
03. - Format the Survey Responses Into Usable Data
With the questions and format for the interactions determined I needed to format the data into readable json objects to display them appropriately on a map or in a chart. To do this I wrote a number of python scripts to read in our survey responses from a csv file and appropiately merge it with topo-json data or category text.
04. - Develop the Final Product and Iterate over the Design
The bulk of the development was done using React and D3. I decided to choose these specific tools because they allowed for fast iterative development without sacrificing functionality.
05. - Publish It!
Once completed, we published it on the Toast website! Within the first 3 weeks received over a thousand downloads of our attached pdf download of the report!
Check it Out!