Ever since we first launched the Nandoca app to our two amazing test restaurants (shout out to Old Street and Bexleyheath!) we’ve been receiving emails about lost passwords and forgotten usernames. A few days ago we released a new version of the app with a major change that we’re super excited about: Nandocas can now log in much faster, more easily, and more securely using only their mobile number!
A quick note on terminology here: the process of getting a person from the point where they know nothing about your app to the point where they’re using it is called ‘user onboarding’. We’re going to be referring to it quite a bit in this post.
The right time
In August 2016 we were racing to release an early prototype of the Nandoca app to our first trial restaurant, Old Street. At that stage, there were key parts of the app we wanted to test and optimise, but the onboarding flow wasn’t really one of them. We just needed to build something quick and dirty to get the rest of the app in people’s hands as soon as possible.
You can see a screenshot of what it looked like here.
Fancy, huh? It's pretty spartan but it did the job perfectly at the time (and thank you so much to all the Nandocas who stuck with us through the username and password era to help us learn more about what you need from the app!)
Six months later, we’re racing to release the Alpha app to more trial restaurants. The next step was going to be releasing to five more. The old process, already creaking at the seams, just wasn't going to cut it anymore.
On the 1st February, we released a new version of the app to our test restaurants. This took us from a single login screen dependent on the app team to a whole login journey that restaurants can manage themselves.
We faced some big gnarly questions as we kicked off this work stream:
- How to ruthlessly minimise any extra workload for restaurant managers?
- How to check that the person trying to log in really is employed by Nando’s?
- How to get the right information from Nando’s systems without human intervention holding each step together?
- How to build this in the right 'Nando's' way?
- How to make it delightful and lovable?
Here’s how we went about answering some of those big questions...
The right journey
We knew we wanted the journey to be as quick and painless as possible for Nandocas. One of our early ideas involved giving Patrãos the ability to unlock the app for their Nandocas using a QR code scanner. This would confirm that they work at Nando’s as well as assigning them to a restaurant in one step.
We tested this with Nandocas, who liked this concept a lot. Great, go ahead and build it right? Well, hold on just a second. When we took a look at what it would take to get this concept built, it turned out to be massively complicated, and it had the negative consequence of adding extra workload to the Patrão. Back to the drawing board.
The key to designing the onboarding flow turned out to be hidden in the journey Nandocas take when they join Nando’s. We sat down with Nandocas from restaurants and Central Support to map the experience of joining the business. We discovered that while every person’s journey is different, there’s one step that is always the same: getting added to People Manager (iTrent). We realised that all we need to get from our users is one piece of unique information, and if we can match that to info in People Manager then we can use their People Manager profile to confirm the Nandoca’s identity, as well as their name and what restaurant they work for.
This turned out to be much simpler for everyone: Nandocas only need to answer one question, Patrãos don’t need to do anything they weren’t already doing, and we don’t need to build a complicated QR code scanner to make it work. A win for everyone!
The new journey looks like this:
This has been an awesomely collaborative effort - especially with the wonderful managers at our trial restaurants, the Nandocas who gave us their time for face to face user testing, and Nando's data and development teams for helping us make this all work. Finally, an especially huge thanks goes to our developers who made the whole thing work!
Is there anything else you’re keen to hear about what we’re working on? Let us know - just ping us at nandoca@nandos.co.uk.