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Food Pulse

Data-powered platform empowering restaurants and chefs to win dinners over

My Role

  • Spearheaded and executed the research, ideation, and design of the project over 3 months. 

  • Translated ambiguous business objectives into executable product features,  unlocked new opportunities, and drove the product roadmap toward success. 

  • Drove alignment through collaboration with business leaders, project managers, data analytics, developers, content strategists, and copywriters. Led design workshops crafted design strategies and deliver effective solutions

The Challenge

In the restaurant industry, a daunting challenge emerges from the depths of online reviews. With a staggering 1 billion and counting, opinions abound, leaving us perplexed about what defines a dining experience as good, average, or terrible. As if that weren't enough, the ever-evolving nature of the restaurant industry demands that chefs and owners remain competitive. To navigate this tumultuous landscape, strategic selection of reliable information sources becomes paramount for staying ahead of the curve.

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How might UFS help chefs and restaurant owners keep track of customer feedback and make the right decisions to win diners over?

The Solution

Food Pulse is a data-driven digital product that Unilever Food Solutions offers as a mobile app, first launched in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines in 2019.


It tracks a restaurant’s reputation and provides a numerical score to help chefs and restaurant owners to monitor their performance and compare against their competitors; the app also quickly spots the restaurant and food trends that matter and provides the solutions to win diners over.

Outcome

  • This app design delivered 104,889 recommendations for 222,713 restaurants in Singapore & Malaysia in two months, with an average user frequency of 2.3/week & 12+ min/session.

  • The app also improves the brand awareness of Unilever Food Solutions and helps achieve its key performance indicators, such as customer acquisition and sales conversions.

  • This is a great case study of how product design elevates the role of the brand from being just a supplier to being a crucial part of its customer success.

Recognition

Rewarded Mob-Ex Awards 2019 Singapore

4 Gold Awards:

Best Use of Mobile Integration,
Best Mobile Based Launch,
Best App (Utility/Service),
Best App (Food & Beverage).

Design Process - Kickoff

What successes have been achieved that can be built upon

I used to work on CMS design and content strategy for UFS.com, the primary online customer touchpoint for Unilever Food Solution.

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By 2019, the contract with UFS was up for renewal. Our team is proactively exploring new approaches to help UFS offer new values to its customers: restaurants and chefs.

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I began by conducting a UX/UI audit of UFS.com, gathering feedback about existing services, and discussing with the business accounts and product managers UFS’s upcoming business objectives.

 

My goal is to determine what we have done correctly, identify areas for improvement, and explore additional resources we can utilize.

Ideation

What are consumer contexts & the context of use?

Based on the user interview, I narrowed it down to two user personas, the main stakeholder who would be most motivated to use our product.

Feature

Define Pulse Score Algorithm

After defining the data sources (review sites), and business rules. Then MRM Hong Kong Team started building and optimizing databases, scrapers, APIs, sentiment models, and pulse scoring logic. 

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Pulse Score Algorithm uses natural language processing and image recognition to identify common patterns in the many different expressions customers make. Machine learning can then be used to uncover the topics and trends that are most important.

 

Combining this data with ratings, sentiments, and other data can be used to generate a single score out of 100, allowing restaurant owners and chefs to quickly gauge their online reputation.

Expand the word cloud feature on homepage into a new Buzz Feature for Easier Restaurant Reviews

In the new "Buzz" feature, we integrated the customer reviews from the previous version and used font hierarchy to show important words. The size of each word is based on how often it appears in the reviews.

On the Buzz page, restaurant owners can see a list of keywords identified by NLP to help them find the main focus areas.

In the previous version, reviews were sorted into broad categories like "service", "flavour", and "price". But after user testing, we learned that this wasn't very helpful. For example, "service" could mean many things. So we made changes to show which dishes and services received positive or negative feedback.

Competitor Compare

The Comparison feature helps users understand how their restaurant is performing compared to competitors. It tracks both their own Pulse Score and their competitors' scores and sends notifications of any changes. Users can select a key competitor to track or compare their Pulse Score with other restaurants in the same location or cuisine.

Launch

Online + Offline channels

To push the launch of the Food Pulse App, we designed a microsite for online launching to ensure adequate coverage. Additionally, to engage chefs and restaurant owners, we designed an offline launching kit with onboarding instructions and a gift food thermometer. The idea is to allow restaurants to take control of their hotness (popularity).

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Questions to think about
How might we redesign UFS online content-consuming and learning experiences to be more accessible and relevant to UFS customers?

Result

Restaurants Scanned

222,713

Chef/Owner Sign-ups per restaurant

2.3

Visits per week

2.6 

Average Session Length

11:15 mins

Trending Issues Analysed

121,833

Recommendations Delivered

104,886

Time Getting Advice

707% increase

Understand the client business objective

The business objective was to help Unilever Food Solution to better engage their customer and establish thought leadership through multiple online customer touchpoints.

As a leading provider of food ingredients and services, Unilever Food Solutions has access to a wealth of information about consumer preferences and behavior.

UFS.com helps restaurants predict trends by providing training and education on new ingredients, dishes, and cuisines, this can help chefs and other food service professionals to stay current with the latest food trends and to adapt their menus accordingly.

By providing valuable content, UFS can build relationships with its customers and create a sense of community around its brand. In addition, the content website allows them to showcase their products and services to potential customers. This can help increase brand awareness and drive sales.

Analysing the existing online channel

The content-rich website without personalisation do not fully meet the needs of Restaurant owners and chefs who have a hectic work schedule.

Besides,
Lead generation for UFS.com through Email Marketing and Social Media is costly and ineffective.

UFS used to use email newsletter and social media posts to drive traffic to UFS.com

However, If the UFS email list or social media followers are not engaged or interested in the shared content, they may not click through to ufs.com. Also, this does not encourage the targeting audience (chefs and restaurant owners) to search for relevant information proactively.

As a result, the effect of using UFS.com to gain customer loyalty and drive sales is limited.

Questions to think about
How might we drive and retain traffic to the UFS-curated content?
(other than paying 10k bucks on sponsored social media posts?

Research

A faster horse or a car?

A better UFS.com website might not be the best solution. After initial discussions, the team concurred that we must obtain insights from end customers (chefs and restaurant owners) regarding their restaurant management challenges and UFS's contribution to their businesses.

Early insights from the field

During the exploratory research stage, with the recruitment help from UFS marketing team, I worked with copywriters in arranging interviews and contextual inquiry sessions at 10 restaurants with owners and chefs.

Our goal was to understand the experience chefs and restaurant owners had with UFS.com, and how can UFS.com be more helpful for their business.

At the same time, we observed their daily operations, environment, and interactions; we asked the question to understand the challenges and needs they faced in engaging their customer and improving overall performances

Insight 1
“With the rise of social media and review websites, reputation is everything”
Pressure from online competition

Most restaurants in Singapore rely heavily on Food Review Apps and social media to attract customers, which also causes tremendous pressure from online competition.

High cost for reputation management

Social media allows customers to easily share their opinions and experiences with others, which can be time-consuming and costly for constant monitoring.

Difficulty to keep up with trends

Offering new and trendy items" is a curse for many restaurants as it can be difficult and costly to implement as consumers' tastes can be fickle

Stakeholder Interview with UFS team

To this end, I worked with product managers in conducting market research, including interviews with UFS Marketing leaders and sales representatives, who have valuable market knowledge and direct experience interacting with restaurants.

Insight 2
“Adapting to changing customer needs and embracing digital innovation is key to staying relevant in the food service industry."
Shift to digital

The food service industry is increasingly moving online, with more customers ordering food online, and more chefs and food service providers turning to digital platforms for information and inspiration.

​Changing customer needs

UFS must keep pace with the ever-changing demands of restaurants to remain relevant, as restaurants must adapt to shifting consumer preferences.

Reframe the problem
How can UFS help restaurants keep track of customer feedback and make the right decisions to win diners over?
Why is it so hard for them to response to online reviews?

Upon mapping out the journey of how chefs collect, review, and respond to online reviews, it became apparent that the process is incredibly tedious and exhausting.

Identifying the problem and finding a suitable solution requires significant manpower before any action can be taken. Furthermore, once any updates are implemented, the entire process must be repeated to determine if the changes were effective, and this takes time too.

Design opportunities emerged:

  1. How might we give the restaurant a measurable performance review?

  2. How might we present online reviews that minimize cognitive effort and save time?

  3. How might we remove the need for accessing all the reviews manually?

  4. How might we encourage UFS content consumption and gain the trust of chefs and owners?

Design Opportunity 1

How might we give restaurants measurable performance review and actionable insights?

  1. What if we represent their performance in numerical value?

  2. What if we can filter out subjective comments and highlight the actionable keywords

  3. What if we evaluate the reviews and categorize the sentiments for the restaurants?

First I need to find out what data can be used to evaluate restaurant performances

Therefore, I conducted research on some popular restaurant review apps including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato, Burpple, HungryGoWhere, and GoogleReviews.
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These review apps provide valuable information to diners and help them make informed dining decisions. The star ratings, written reviews, and photos help diners better understand what a restaurant is like, and the search features help them find the right restaurant for their needs.
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At the same time, these data insights and feedbacks are crucial for restaurants to improve and keep up with the competition.

Low fidelity sketches

I started to sketch low-fidelity wireframes based on possible user scenarios. 

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Chef encounters the problem:

  1. Chef noticed fewer dinners recently

  2. Chef checks online reviews of his own and competitor's restaurants. Frustrated by the time it takes, the chef realizes he needs a more efficient way to analyze the reviews and feedback.

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Chef solves the problem with Food Pulse:

  1. Chef downloaded Food Pulse, which analyses customer feedback and provides insights on areas for improvement.

  2. On the app, Chef can see a collection of reviews from different platforms being categorized based on patterns identified by NLP.

  3. Chef clicked into Service Section and filtered the review by sentiments as the chef thought the reason for the suddenly reduced customers could be found here.

First Iteration

To maintain a consistent brand image, I based the app's interface on the UFS Brand Guideline and incorporated the UFS Orange as the thematic color.


Once users log in, they must register their restaurant to receive the most up-to-date PulseScore, calculated using our algorithm. Our goal is to provide users with a clear understanding of their restaurant's performance level and expectations for their actions.


Through our research, we found that many chefs and restaurant owners use food review apps to identify areas for improvement.

 

Therefore, the second half of the interface displays topics identified by NLP to help users identify the main focus areas. The number of comments indicates the issue's importance, providing users with valuable insights to improve their restaurant's performance.

Second Iteration

Based on feedbacks from the client and user testing analysis, my focus was on addressing the issues that users have raised, such as

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(1) providing further explanations of the score

(2) providing summary or keyword highlights for reviews

(3) grouping reviews by sentiment instead of timeline

(4) using consistent design patterns


My goal was to make it easier for users to track and measure customer satisfaction, make informed decisions, and effectively indicate customer satisfaction levels.

Experiementing Color and Font Style to Indicate Sentiment in Word Clouds

In word clouds, the size of the word reflects its frequency, while color and font style can indicate sentiment.

The sentiment analysis algorithm categorizes reviews as positive, negative, or neutral, and displays the top positive and negative keywords for each category.

Positive keywords are highlighted in green, while negative ones are highlighted in red.

This approach provides a more nuanced and accurate representation of user sentiment, enabling restaurant owners to focus on areas that need improvement. However, sentiment analysis algorithms are not always accurate and can be influenced by nuances in language, sarcasm, and context. Therefore, manual validation and adjustments may be necessary.

Improved User Experience for Analyzing Customer Sentiments

We made it easier for chefs and restaurant owners to identify problem areas by redesigning the user flow in the second iteration.

The Buzz feature now displays the top-mentioned keywords with a quick summary of customer sentiments represented by emojis, which is based on sentiment analysis categorizing reviews into positive, negative, or neutral. Users can dive deeper into the subpage by tapping on the words, where they can choose to explore more keywords or delve into the current ones.

The Pulse Score & The Buzz feature set the foundation for this app

By providing a measurable score, it removes any ambiguity and uncertainty that may arise from subjective reviews. The highlighted keywords and customer sentiment insights also provide valuable insights and save time by summarizing large amounts of text data. This feature is crucial in helping our users prioritize their actions and improve their restaurant's overall performance.

Design Opportunity 2

With Pulse Score Algorithm, how might we use data analysis to provide more insights for the chefs and restaurant owners?

I identified two main ways to further benefit the chefs and restaurant owners by making full use of the Pulse Score.


The first is to provide data trend analysis. Food Pulse could track and provide weekly, monthly, and yearly data analytics of the Pulse Score for restaurants, allowing them to reflect on their performance and identify potential business opportunities. However, this feature would require a large amount of data collecting and storing for several years to provide true value.

The second is data comparison. We could provide a competitor comparison feature for restaurants to help them understand their current standing in the market. While this also requires a large amount of data collection, it does not require users to wait for long periods before providing value.

After several discussions with fellow designers and product managers, we have decided to prioritize the Competitor Comparison feature.

This feature provides value for all users, even those who only visit the app occasionally. If our user retention rate is good, we can then consider developing the timely tracking feature.

Design Opportunity 3

How might we encourage UFS content consumption and gain trust from chefs and owners?

We've discussed whether our new mobile product should completely replace UFS.com, but the answer is no. The user scenario and main user group for each platform are different.

UFS.com serves a global brand in multiple countries and regions, and has dedicated teams for engaging customers. Our mobile product was only developed for the South East Asia region for now. Additionally, UFS.com serves not only chefs and owners, but also retailers of UFS products. Finally, desktop browsing is still a good option for users who want to browse certain media such as tables or videos.

First, mobile content is not replacing UFS.com

Our goal is to create a mobile app that provides value beyond just a mobile-optimized version of UFS.com. By offering personalized features, users can receive tailored recommendations on tips and trends that address their specific needs. The ability to set alerts for new articles and receive in-app messages further enhances the user experience.

Personalized Features for Tailored Recommendations and Enhanced User Experience
Onboarding

A step-by-step guide for the user to set up their restaurant profile for customised services:

  1. Personal account setup

  2. Select topics for content recommendations

  3. Enter and Sync your restaurant information to generate a customized report

  4. Select the competitor restaurants on which the user might like to get an update.

Trends & Tips

As a product manager, our goal is to provide users with the right tips and latest trends to keep their diners happy. This section features content adapted from UFS.com, edited, and formatted to suit the reading habits of mobile phone users. Our aim is to ensure that users can easily read the content during a quick break, so they can gain knowledge and insights to improve their restaurant's performance.

Reflection & Vision

The Use of Data and AI

As a product designer, I agree that AI has the potential to significantly reduce human effort and improve efficiency in various industries, including the restaurant industry. However, it is important to ensure that the algorithms used are trained correctly and effectively to produce accurate and reliable results.

To achieve this, we need to conduct user research and understand the pain points and challenges restaurant owners and chefs face. Based on this information, we can design an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface, allowing them to quickly access and understand the insights generated by AI.

The collaboration between product designers, product managers, and data analysts are crucial in creating a successful AI-powered product that meets the needs of restaurant owners and chefs.

Suppose I were to continue working on the product. In that case, I can see that as more data is collected, we can better understand users’ needs, validate the accuracy of data and identify any errors or discrepancies that need to be corrected.  We can provide more value to the restaurant by providing them with data trend analysis over months and years.

Food pulse is a great case study of how product design elevates the role of the brand from being just a supplier to being a key part of its customer success.

 

Whether it's Nike or Apple, the audiences do not only use their product; they believe in its value. Customers love a brand with empathy and social impact. More traditional service and product providers transform their businesses by building a loyal community.

Food Pulse is a prime example of how UFS is leveraging its influence and resources to give back to its customers and earn their loyalty.

For a product designer, community building means designing experiences that not only meet the functional needs of the users but also tap into their emotional and social needs. It involves creating a brand image and voice that resonates with the target audience, designing user interfaces that are engaging and intuitive, and creating opportunities for users to connect with the brand. By building a solid community, product designers can create a sense of belonging and loyalty that can drive long-term success for the brand.

Community Building

Overview

Lack of relevance
The website is not tailored to the specific needs of restaurant owners and chefs, and they need to spend time searching for the content that is most relevant to them.

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Lack of mobile optimization:
The article contains long reads and images; many articles need to be optimised for mobile devices, making it difficult for restaurant owners and chefs to access the website on the go.

Get your restaurant’s online reputation at a glance

  • Your restaurant ratings, reviews, photos, and comments are combined into a simple Pulse Score out of 100
     

  • Your Pulse Score can go up or down, depending on your customers.

See where you stand against competitors

  • Track your Pulse Score as well as your competitors’ and get notified when their scores change
     

  • Discover what they’re getting right or wrong

Learn What Diners Like and Dislike Most

  • See what people love and dislike about your restaurant

  • Find out what your diners are talking about most

  • Address the issues that really matter

Get the Right Tips and Latest Trends to Keep Diners Happy

  • Receive the right tips that will help you solve your issues

  • Get updates on the latest trends to stay ahead of the competition

  • You can also pick from a wide array of topics that you’re interested in

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