RED LOBSTER

This product supports the day-to-day work of 40,000+ Red Lobster corporate and field employees.

OVERVIEW

Sector Dining restaurant chain

Project Description Meka led a six person team in the redesign of Red Lobster’s intranet to supports the day-to-day work of 40,000+ Red Lobster’s corporate and field employees.

My Roles Senior UX Designer, Product Designer, Client Relationship Main Point of contanct for UX related needs.

Business Challenge Red Lobster set out to create an interactive and social intranet for all of its employees (40,000).

Design challenge Design an interactive and social product that would equaly serve corporate and field employees.

Viewpoints Desktop, iOS mobile.

PROCESS BREAKDOWN

Business Goals and Mission/Vision Workshop

The first workshop I held was the Business Goals workshop, where I re-confirmed business goals and stakeholders brainstormed about their ideal product.

Needs Gathering Workshop

I conducted 3 Design Thinking workshops at Red Lobster. Workshops were conducted at HQ.

Learning looking back at the project I would have liked to find a better way to persuade stakeholders of the importance of having more field employees in our Design Thinking sessions. I believe the results would have been even better if more field representatives were to be present in the corporate workshops.

Needs Prioritization

Since the end-users population for Red Lobster’s intranet was composed of corporate and field employees with different pain points and goals, prioritizing needs and making sure I designed for most (if not all) users was crucial to the sucess of the project. This also represented a significant design challenge.

UX Design

End users at Red Lobster wanted an interactive Intranet that would allow them to conduct polls, ask questions, and suggest better ways to conduct business. I utilized the top right hand side of their home page for Ask and Suggest, and the bottom right hand side of the real estate for a section that could be utilized for polls, or to show case great people.

Below, an annotated Home Page wireframe:

The below wireframe showcases Great People instead of the poll functionality. We built the system, so that admins could easily implement a poll or showcase Great People on the bottom right hand side of the home page.

The project needed to move rapidly and stakeholders reacter better to design comps than to annotated wireframes when they needed to provide quick approval. Therefore, I worked closely with my graphic design team in China to create graphic design comps and, sometimes, wireframe-graphic design hybrids. This presentation technique worked really well to speed up our approval process.

Learning it pays off to be creative in the way you present your designs to clients. In the case of Red Lobster, stakeholders were very happy with seeing and providing approval on a mixture of wireframes and design comps.

Creative Design

As I was designing the UX I worked with the Creative Design team to answer their functionality and UX questions and to provide feedback on their graphic design.

Below are some graphic design samples the Creative team created based on my wireframes

It was very important for the people at Red Lobster to see their products (amazing dishes) on their intranet and get inspired by their new creations. Therefore, I designed a second version of their home page that showcased a carousel with space for bigger imagery, which they could use to display beautiful gourmet images.

Development, Testing & Launch

I served as the subject matter expert resource for the dev and testing teams when it came to questions regarding functionality.

I also helped the QA team with six hours of functionality testing, and reported bugs to our internal system.

CONCLUSION

This project was particularly challenging due to its fast-paced schedule. However, finding the correct way to present deliverables to your clients ammeliorates any levels of stress you and your team may be feeling. In this case my compromise was to deliver design comps and wires/desig comps for stakeholders’ approval. This strategy worked very well and was greatly appreciated by our clients, who were on a tight schedule and under a lot of pressure to deliver their new intranet.