EasyBake
A Mobile Service to Empower Small Bakeries Scale and Manage Operations through Data Analytics
Team
Mia Manavalan, Haley Park, Jackie Hu, Ipsita Mallick, Angelina Thomas
Role
Guerilla User Research, Mobile First Approach, Service Design, Prototyping, Stakeholder Pitch
Timeline
January - February 2020 (3 Weeks)
Overview
The Problem
My team was briefed to developed a mobile app service that provides value by bringing a new service orientation for our client company Markel Food Group, an international baking equipment manufacturer.
Currently, Markel’s model focuses on industrial sized baked equipment for large-scale bakeries and requires each client to buy one or more large scale machines to produce their a desired item.
Recent trends have shown increasing public preferences for small, artisanal cafes and bakeries.
EasyBake
Public interest in smaller batch baking creates an opportunity for Markel to tap into a growing market to increase their customer base.
EasyBake consolidates the resources of all Markel companies to deliver high-quality pre-mixed ingredients & bakery products to small-scale bakeries who struggle with investing in and maintaining industrial-scale manufacturing equipment with limited space and resources.
It empowers small bakeries to optimize their product offerings by providing consumer food & health trends and insights and allowing customers to customise their orders accordingly.
Define
Understanding Markel Food Group
We started identifying Markel’s existing business model, their relationship with customers and any inefficiencies in their processes. Our research revealed that Markel is made up of four child companies each focusing on equipment for different types of baked goods ranging from chips to pies.
Each child company acts as a separate entity, but utilizes the resources of each other.
Thus, the customer experience is disjointed since each child company has their own processes and services that create a sense of incoherence for clients who own more than one Markel Group product.
Markel’s Goals
Provide high-quality, innovative process solutions to the customers
Deliver value to food producers at every stage through complete automated solutions and technical support
Build trust with customers to become a market leader
Markel’s Brand
Markel brands itself as having a ‘culture of innovation’, but the branding and marketing of its website feels outdated. By providing bakeries insights into the latest health trends, Markel can prove that its keeping up with the times.
Ideation
Stakeholder Map
In creating a stakeholder map and articulating the value flows between the entities, we found numerous inefficiencies and pain points.
We found that much of Markel’s business model and offerings we based around selling to large bakeries that would each be required to personally own every piece of equipment needed to produce their desired good.
From the stakeholder map we identified that due to the large size of Markel equipment, the company was missing out on a growing market of small-scale bakeries (which were not on the map at present) and could strategically leverage data to provide more value to its clients.
Reverse Assumptions
In order to more broadly explore how a mobile service could help to improve Markel’s business, our team engaged in a reverse assumption exercise.
During this exercise, we challenged our existing beliefs through first writing down what we thought to be true, the opposite of that and what solution could support the opposite conclusion.
Persona
Meet Joe, a baker & business owner in Pittsburgh.
Joe owns a small bakery in Shadyside, Pittsburgh.
He and his bakers arrive at the bakery at 4 am each morning to:
knead doughs for various different products
wait for the doughs to rise
and cook other essentials to prepare his bakery products for the day.
He just started his business and does not have the resources to invest in baking equipment or the space to operate them.
He isn’t able to focus on growing his business and keep up with changing consumer bakery trends.
The Opportunity
Markel could service the growing number of small bakeries and cafes without physically needing to alter their equipment.
Leveraging economies of scale, large data, and on-demand supply of baking dough, Markel’s new service EasyBake would heavily add large amounts of value to its stakeholders.
Pain Points for Small Bakeries to Invest in Markel’s Equipment
Equipment size is too big.
Equipment cost is too high.
On-site Maintenance is difficult.
How Markel’s EasyBake Solves the Problems
Pre-mixed ingredients are delivered to small bakeries through EasyBake regularly without the need to own heavy equipment.
EasyBake’s analytics provides insights to customer trends so that small bakeries can focus on growing their business.
Develop
(Prototyping & Testing)
Service Outline & Sketches
We used paper prototypes for our initial design iterations and low-fidelity mockups of the app.
We were exploring ways to deliver a service experience that bakers can easily become familiar with and find engaging.
Initial User Feedback
One of the biggest opportunities to add value was in helping bakeries make better businesses decisions through analytics. Dietary trend forecasts and connecting them with the right Markel products in a trends page would be valuable.
Our service would gathering anonymized crowd sourced data from all participating bakeries and market research institutions to offer insights into growing customer demand for particular goods or specialized ingredients.
Mid-Fidelity Prototypes
In the medium-fidelity prototype, we decided to pivot and gave form to how users would flow through the mobile service app.
Analytics Page Flow
Data Analytics Sources
One of our data sources focused on consumer health trends. Consulting firms such as Deloitte, Bain, McKinsey, Consumer Reports and Nielsen conduct and publish research on these topics, and would be great source for analytics.
Transaction data from POS systems, such as Toast and Clover would have insights into what products sold so that bakeries can plan their for the week.
Markel would send these APIs to the EasyBake app to appear on the Analytics & Consumer Insights page.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
The goal of our high-fidelity prototype was to articulate visual design elements such as information architecture, font weight and other attributes could help reduce friction when navigating the application.
Throughout this step, we explored how to reduce the number of touch points a user would have to go through in order to achieve a particular goal.
How does EasyBake help Small Bakeries?
Weekly Analytics
Empowering small bakery businesses to optimize their product offerings by providing consumer food & health trends and insights.
Subscription Service
Providing premixed ingredients from Markel’s industrial-scale operations to small bakeries, who can now save time and focus on improving their service through faster production.
Bakeries can also customize their weekly subscription orders of premixed ingredients as per recommendations from the weekly analytics feature to optimize their business based on consumer insights and diet trends.
Managing Orders
Real-time order tracking and viewing past orders history after checkout for bakers to manage or modify their customized orders and subscriptions of premixed ingredients on a weekly basis.
Future Scope
From this project, we successfully proposed and designed viable new services that can innovate Markel Food Group through a mobile-first approach. We learned the difference between product design and service design, the importance of creating delightful microinteractions, and the power of data collection. Next steps would include:
Personalized Smart Suggestion by predicting what products will make more sells for the bakeries by incorporating ML in the system
In the “Analytics” page, make the title “Health Trends” more comprehensive to the users
Explore different gesture-based interaction methods beyond scrolling
Interview people who are working for bakeries or baking equipment to consolidate our design solutions.