Product Discovery
User Research
UI / UX Design + Prototyping
Product Management
1 x Designer / PM (me)
3 x Software Engineer
1 x QA Analyst
July 2023 - Dec 2023
Stellar Menus was developed as a versatile solution to meet the evolving needs of the hospitality industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform featured content management for easy menu updates, mobile menu for contactless ordering, and basic print menu options.
As pandemic restrictions lifted, customer demand returned to print menus, risking customer churn. The initial MVP print features were difficult to use and lacked support for custom designs, creating a gap for customers moving back to print.
I led the redesign and oversaw the development of the 1.0 Menu Printer application, focusing on expanding its design functionality and improving the overall UI/UX. Upon release we saw a ~40% increase in menu printing across our entire customer base while also eliminating the churn risk from all at-risk customers.
Simple one click layout buttons designed to allow users to easily changes layouts.
One of our product gaps was that the menus our system could create were very limited in both layout and design. Our new system new required flexibility to allow users to easily and quickly view different layouts and styles for their menu items and sections.
Easily drag and drop menu content into canvas.
Quickly identify overflow menu sections.
A key challenge was ensuring updated menu information still fit on a single, printable page. Previously, changes often caused content to overflow without notice, leading to unexpected reprints and time-consuming adjustments.
During the redesign, we identified the need for users to be alerted when content overflowed outside printable areas. This feature allows users to focus on menu updates while easily resolving overflow issues with minor tweaks before printing. The result: a more intuitive and efficient user experience.
Many of our customers expressed the frustration of writing quality wine descriptions for their menus. This indicated a lack of accessible resources or tools to create sommelier-quality descriptions.
As a quick test, we initially launched a wine description tool on our marketing site, which gained some quick traffic. This led us to test a beta version in our Menu Manager app, but it didn't gain much traction. As a result, we kept it as a lead generation tool, where it saw more use outside the app.
We developed a simple tool in Menu Manger app using early OpenAI API Chat completes, allowing users to generate wine descriptions with basic length control.
These are just a few highlights. If you're interested in a deeper dive, I'm happy to chat. Feel free to reach out and we can find a time to connect.
