By: Harri Pyykölä, UX Lead
The title encapsulates what we have been doing at Jamix for the past three decades; developing tools for kitchen professionals that help them succeed in their work. Today, tomorrow, next week, and a year from now.
Effective professional tools are not created in a vacuum but require an understanding of the users’ needs and preferences, as well as the demands of the job. By understanding the user’s world, we are better equipped to create intuitive and meaningful tools that provide kitchens with significantly better visibility into, for example, quality, costs, and sustainability of food production.
The Challenge Of a Difficult Operating Environment
We all know how challenging our industry is. Situations in all operations change and evolve rapidly; even the daily struggle with ingredient prices and availability, employee turnover, increasingly multicultural work communities, and at the most demanding, rapid changes in entire kitchen concepts as customer needs evolve.
More Functional Tools Through Participatory User Experience Design
User experience design is key when designing efficient and pleasant tools. Design is not just a project with a beginning and an end, but a process that considers the user’s holistic experience and strives to improve it continuously.
To better understand the changes and evolving demands of our industry, we have formed an in-house discovery team. The team consists of professionals within kitchen, product management, marketing, software, and UX, each bringing their expertise to the development process.
The discovery team continuously provides new and valuable information to product development, confirming what our customers tell us repeatedly through open feedback or support tickets.
Aiming At a Comprehensive, Assisted Experience And Its Continuous Improvement
By combining the knowledge gained from our long and multi-disciplinary experience, the feedback and development suggestions from our customers, trends, and future scenarios, we have been able to crystallize the goals of our development work into understandable and concrete themes.
One of the most prominent themes that has emerged is assistance.
Assistance can be seen from many angles. Continuous change and adapting to it at work is easier and more motivating when it is supported. A clear and user-friendly interface is user assistance. An interface that adapts to the work role helps the user perform their tasks faster and with fewer errors. Integrations with other necessary work tools provide the conditions for building meaningful work roles and help kitchens organize into more efficient units and, for example, manage their procurement to favor more local ingredients.
Carefully Planned Is Not Enough
The final, critical phase of development work is software piloting. In piloting, we test with real users to ensure that our assumptions about the next generation of usability and assistance tools are found to be useful and necessary. The tool must, so to speak, justify its cost.
JAMIX Kitchen Intelligence System Is The Productivity Tool For Your Restaurant
JAMIX Kitchen Intelligence System is a cutting edge, intuitive, cloud-based kitchen management software for managing any size and type of restaurant, food service operation, dining service, or catering service.
Comprehensive JAMIX Kitchen Intelligence System manages several sides of commercial kitchen operations including recipe management and costing, allergen information, menu planning and nutritional analysis, inventory management and purchasing. All this in one system and with all information seamlessly connected.
