Pizza Vinoteca — Lori Hoffman Meller

Top Chef alum Stephen Aspirinio asked The Barbarian Group to design a digital dining experience for his new restaurant, Pizza Vinoteca. Customers at Pizza Vinoteca can dine-in and order from an iPad menu, while those placing take-out orders use an interactive kiosk and watch their food preparation progress through the kitchen on a digital display.

The Barbarian Group was tasked with designing all the digital components guests would interact with. The iPad menu would need to be usable for both repeat customers and tourists coming in off the street. The Kiosk needed to interface with point of sale hardware and a digital sign and ensure a speedy checkout.

Challenge

We faced the unique challenge of creating digital products that took on most of the duties traditionally handled by waitstaff. Meal ordering is not always a neat, linear process. How can a digital menu and ordering system not only replace, but provide a better, easier experience for diners?

Approach

After a series of brainstorming sessions where the team quickly sketched different ideas for the structure of the menu.

Menu Cover

Guided Menu

Editorial Menu

We presented our concept sketches in a workshop with the client to iron out the type of experience we wanted to proceed with, which would determine the structure of the menu.

We moved forward by focusing on the two user types: one who prefers a guided experience and/or is more reliant on communication with a server and one who prefers to get food to the table quickly with little to no interaction with a server.

UX DOCUMENTATION

Guided menu

The diner can proceed through the guided menu beginning with Wine & Drinks. Each item has a control overlay which allows the diner to view an item detail page or add to tab immediately. The diner has additional options available from the Item Detail Page and recommended pairings with other menu items.

Modifications and recommendations

As the diner proceeds through the guided menu at the page header, she selects an item to view more details. She checks off a modification option and is thinking about pairing the roasted zucchini with her pepperoni pizza. She checks "add this" from the overlay to add both the pepperoni pizza and the roasted zucchini to her tab.

Dining tab

The diner is alerted whenever an item is added to her tab. She can view her tab at any time, either by selecting the "tab" button from the global nav or selecting "go to my tab" from the alert drawer. The diner adds items to her tab throughout her meal and selects "send to kitchen" whenever she's ready to receive each course. She completes her meal and receives the bill after selecting "checkout".

VISUAL DESIGN

INTERACTIVE KIOSK & ORDER TRACKING DISPLAYS

The kiosk is a 22" touchscreen display for takeout orders. Because the kiosk needs to allow for quicker ordering and payment transactions the menu is presented as a single scrollable list with a top navigation that allows the user to immediately jump to a specific section, like appetizers/sides ("not pizza") or drinks.

During the checkout process, the customer enters her name before the payment step. Her name is then added to a running list of other waiting customers on a bank of three large HD displays.

These order tracking displays give takeout customers an idea of the time remaining until their food is ready by using data provided by the kitchen’s back of house ordering system. In addition, the display shows content such as everyday objects translated into Italian, to entertain customers as they wait for their food.