Consulting with Strawberry
This is a qualitative research and consulting project my teammates and I had undertaken at the University of Michigan, in the Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations course, with a Point-of-Sales restaurant software company called Strawberry.
My team members were Asha, Josue, and Sanmeet.
My team members were Asha, Josue, and Sanmeet.
Problem Description
Strawberry is a start-up restaurant software (Point-of-Sale) company. The selling point of Strawberry is that they are hardware independent, in that their software can work with any existing restaurant terminals without the restaurants having to update. They also promise to combine all software services into one app and reduce workspace clutter. Strawberry asked my teammates and I to investigate why their customers, who are restaurant owners, were using only a few of the features Strawberry offered. Strawberry especially wanted to upsell their new Loyalty program. They assumed that restaurant owners were not tech savvy and needed to be handheld through the process.
Methodology
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We conducted 6 interviews, two with Strawberry personnel, two with restaurant owners, and two with restaurant workers, accumulating more than 10 hours of interviews. After some initial contact we discovered that our assumptions and our client’s assumptions were wrong, and made changed to our interview protocols. We compiled and organized our notes using an affinity wall. Our final deliverable was a report with details of our investigations and contained recommendations for improvement, and is available upon request.
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Findings
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Our team found that restaurant owners in fact were happy with the product and ready to move on. Even if they were not tech savvy, they were still very excited about the potential of the technology.
The problem was with the product itself. Strawberry only had two of their six features live and ready to go. The existing features experienced persistent technical issues, mostly due to the hardware being unable to support Strawberry software. This is in addition to a host of other problems, including the lack of resources, as is common with start-up companies, and the lack of documentation of features and bugs, as is common with young companies. |
Despite Strawberry’s efforts to combine services and reduce workspace clutter, this restaurant still has to rely on multiple vendors for different features.
Our team made recommendations based on these findings.
Our team made recommendations based on these findings.
