(The following is a summary of my talk from Design Week 2019).

At Brightloom, we’ve created an elegant way to merge digital and physical experiences into the same products and environments to create a futuristic interaction centered around getting food, but made possible by technology.  The products we have built are very new, and many people see this model playing a key role in the future of restaurants and retail.

As Brightloom’s Physical Design Director, I lead our industrial and environment design.  In addition I lead user testing and research for Brightloom design.  My role is to focus on customer experience, aesthetics and usability for products.

I’ve been with Brightloom since the beginning when we were creating the concept for the first eatsa store.  In my journey at here, I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the incredible team that developed the concept and design for eatsa’s restaurants and hardware products.  It’s been a highly rewarding journey, Not just in the outcome of what we have created, but to be part of the process all of thinking that goes into the work that we do.

As we all come together for design week and focus on the theme of community, for Brightloom it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about humanity, which is crucial not just to our work but really to all great design.  We have proven that bringing technology to restaurants doesn’t mean sacrificing the human experience. 

But wait!  I know what you’re thinking… and believe me, we have heard it all.  Technology (specifically AUTOMATION) can be a very polarizing topic. The fact of the matter is that the human is at the center of every experience we create.  If anything, creating a retail solution that is so tech forward caused us to be way more focused on not losing the human interaction.

Ironically, for all the talk about technology’s effect of removing the human element, I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen people smiling when they pick up their food from one of our cubbies, or bringing their friends in and explaining to them how it works, or having a companion take a video of them while they’re getting their food so they can sharing their experience on social media.

This is due to the incredible amount of thought and attention our team puts into making our technology feel approachable, intuitive and human.

Technology has always been core to the experience and philosophy of Brightloom/eatsa… not just as a way to solve problems but also to create the best user experience.  Before we built the first restaurant, Our attitude was that we are not building a restaurant – we are building something entirely new. And it is what restaurants will all need to become.   But at that time, we didn’t have a restaurant… all we had were ideas, sketches, prototypes .

It brought to mind the old proverb If you want to go quick, go alone If you want to go far, go together.

Sounds simple… but what do you tell someone who needs to go real far… real quick?  This is the struggle we all face as designers, problem solvers and creatives.  We’re often tasked to go really far in too short amount of time.  And do this while working across diverse teams, getting buy in from multiple stakeholders, navigate team dynamics AND not losing our souls as designers in the process – what about your OWN humanity?

This struggle was not exclusive to the early moments of eatsa, but a challenge we still face today at Brightloom with numerous partner deployments under our belt.

Back to the story… Eatsa launches.  We had certainly captured people’s attention around the world with this completely new and exciting experience.  Our team thought hard about how we could bottle up what we created in that first store and then reproduce it.  As we often do at eatsa… we were asking ourselves how can we create a system of rapid scale.  Enter EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES.

Experience principles represent brand aspirations and customer needs. They keep us focused on the why, what and how of engaging people through our products and services.

Think of them as a set of guidelines that an organization commits to and follows from strategy through delivery to produce mutually beneficial and differentiated customer experiences.

At a basic level, think of experience principles as feelings: How do we want people to feel when they use our products/services?

For Brightloom, we saw the opportunity for these principles to serve three key purposes.

• First, Experience Principles serve as shared vision and standard for our products and services.  They would allow our greater team to collective define what we consider to be exceptional work
• Next, we can use Experience Principles DURING the problem solving process as criteria for decisions that we make.  This not only keeps our entire organization moving efficiently, but also creates healthy discussions that guide a consistent direction for our outcomes
• Finally, Experience Principles serve as a tool for measurement of success when we step back and evaluate the final product.  We can measure to what degree we check the boxes on delivering a great experience

They are derived from understanding our customers. It was important to begin by gathering as much data as possible our customers.  Since we have a diverse range of customers, this data came from a handful of sources.

For our “Store Guest” customers,  we derived insights from a mental model our research team had composed from a series of customers interviews.

For our “Store Employee” customers, we leaned on user research interviews done by our by back of house ops team.

And then for our “Corporate Employee” customers, we drew on numerous interviews we conducted and also found inspiration in the existing customers we had in this category.

Because Experience Principles aren’t just for designers, it was imperative that the principles were formed by a multi-disciplinary group.  In this process collaborated with Customer Success, Sales, Design, Product, Software and Hardware.  In our working sessions, we used the mentioned data and insights as a jumping off point to create draft principles in response to the pain points and needs we recognized within our customers.  This was done across several brainstorms, and after every working session I collected all the ideas that were documented on the insight worksheets.  In total, there were 95 completed worksheets across the 3 customer groups.

Then it was time to connect the dots.  We analyzed all of the proposed principles, identified the trends, patterns and consistencies and distilled them down.  This evolved into draft Experience Principles which we then brought back to the greater multidisciplinary group so they could react to the insights and propose draft principles.

The first part of this process is to CREATE, REFINE, then FINALIZE.  Now it was time to SOCIALIZE, OPERATIONALIZE, and EVANGELIZE.

1. SOCIALIZE (revealing company-wide and then conduct follow up interviews with individual teams to reinforce the ideas)
   
2. OPERATIONALIZE (building out tools to make the principles accessible and easy to use, creating visible representation around the office)
   
3. EVANGELIZE (Using the principles relentlessly as a foundation in conversation when problem solving)