Project Overview
Shift4 owns a restaurant management system called Lighthouse Business Manager (LBM) which is part of the Harbor Touch point of sale system (as seen on Bar Rescue). I was on the LBM team and tasked with doing several updates to the platform. Before making any design decisions I thought it was important to get user feedback.
First I received training on the LBM platform. After training I did a UX assessment and spoke to the product owners & the customer support group who help customers on a regular basis. The analysis and preliminary conversations gave me a baseline to work from and helped to design my interviews.
To get interviewees I took advantage of a specific installer/support expert, Drew. Drew had an excellent relationship with several customers, in fact he was mentioned more than once as the only reason some customers stuck around. Drew gave me a list of email addresses and I sent a standardized email to seek out anyone willing to speak to me.
The interviews were a joint effort, Drew joined me for the first minutes to make introductions and help the customers feel more at ease with me. All the interviews were conducted via Zoom as this happened during 2021, mid-pandemic. I also had an analytics expert who joined me so she could discuss what types of analytics users would want added to the LBM dashboard.
One interesting aspect of the interviews was how difficult it became to stick to a script. Customers "came prepared," they had very specific issues they wanted to discuss. I had to be able to pivot and "switch gears" multiple times in my discussions to accommodate user needs.
All the interviews were recorded, the videos and my notes were made available to everyone on the team. Putting together my results document was a little difficult as all the users I spoke with were very dissatisfied with LBM.
I narrowed down my results to an 11 page slide deck which I also shared with the LBM team. The knowledge I gained was applied to a different project which was a redesign and re-architecture of LBM.
Project Elements
Notes from one of the interviews
Presentation, the actual slide deck I used when I shared my work with my team.