As before, you can see a video presentation as well or instead of the blog post below.

Design Monday #2 – Lunch! from frankieroberto on Vimeo.

Lunch is something that is taken for granted, embedded in daily routines. This week’s Design Monday session was about lunch and how it can be improved. Not the foodstuff but the ‘event’, the planning and organising and managing of lunch. Why? Well it’s something that is undertaken everyday, is highly social and yet is fraught with ‘issues’ (we took on the subject after a spate of tweets saying what people were doing for lunch, what they were eating, who they were meeting etc.). It seemed ripe for a makeover.

The ‘problem’ with lunch covers a few things: who to have lunch with, where to have lunch, what to eat. We take a lot of this for granted. Spontaneous ‘coming togethers’ around lunch do happen, but invariably there is some planning involved – the who, what, where, when, how and why. Some of this is routine – you go to the same sandwich shop because it’s nearby and get one of a few different sandwiches (which you’ve trialled), at a certain time (when your contract allows and when the shop is presumably not to busy) and eat at your desk. We did some quick persona work and cam up with Jenny, 33, a single administrator in a big office of 50 people in central London. She treats herself three times a week for lunch ‘out’. Because she doesn’t go every day she has to negotiate who to go with, where to go and what to eat.

Jenny is subject to diet ‘fads’. Food is both a passion and a curse. Choosing what to eat is not a simple task. She’ll have in mind foods that are healthy, or non-fatty but won’t be able to make a decision on what to eat until she knows where she is eating and what they have on the menu. Planning ahead is hard, because her lunch will depend on what she ate the previous night and also had for lunch yesterday. ‘Guilt’ for perceived weakness at following an ‘ideal’ is a strong emotional factor. Other decision making factors about where to eat and with whom, might include who you ‘like’ and who is going out to lunch, time taken to get to the shop and waiting time at the shop and the menu at the shop (items and cost).

Let’s tackle each of these problems in turn.

Who you like and if they are going for lunch. Having collectively worked in lots of offices, this is a major topic of conversation before lunch. Knowing what other people are doing is really important, especially to Jenny, for whom lunch is a ‘treat’ and who wants to spend her time well. But have you noticed that broaching who is going for lunch is a difficult thing in a large office. You don’t want to invite Sally openly because she sits next to Pete and you don’t like Pete and you don’t want to spend lunch with him. And Claire always brings Amanda, her best friend and they’re a pain when they’re together. The problem is one of social ‘awkwardness’, you’re not able to ask people because you’re not always sure the response is one you’ll want and because you don’t want to be seen to be ‘needing’ to have someone to go with. It’s a faff.

Solution: Creating a reason to invite people to lunch – giving people an excuse. That would help. Then you’re not asking them, merely letting them know of a good reason to do something. This might sound minor but a lot of so-called social software totally fails to understand the ‘soft’ side of the social in design work.

The Menu. Menu items change, specials are offered and ingredients run out. Point-of-sale (POS) is where most people decide what to eat. People don’t choose their lunch online and then collect it. This is mainly because choosing the venue is a collective decision embarked on as lunch starts but also because the ‘choosing’ is good. People like to buy and they make decisions that hinge on what their friends are eating. Cumulative advantage prevails amongst food as well as music and people’s buying decisions are informed by what their friends buy and eat. So, the guilt that Jenny could have about having a perceived unhealthy meal is offset if her friends also choose to eat ‘unhealthily’. And that sort of decision making is negotiated by seeing how people behave, talking about it and agreeing collectively. It’s not simple.

Solution 1: You can start to segment the audience. Some people will be more price sensitive than others. Allowing people to ‘book’ their lunch in advance provides two benefits. Firstly, it allows them to create ‘groups’ around lunch. Invite friends to participate in choosing their lunch, see what your friends are thinking of buying and potentially help them by tying this into diet menus (Atkins, Weightwatchers, whatever…). Opening people up to trialling new menu items could be a possibility here, as you then have an implicit recommendation engine as people see what their colleagues are trying. Secondly, it allows people to save money and budget their lunch over a period (week, month etc.). Weekly email prompts could be supported by daily text messages as an option if your advance booking is due. Sure, this a web based solution and that ‘feels’ like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It’s a big office solution.

Solution 2: Provide better labelling and slicing of the menu. Slice them up by popularity (wouldn’t that be good to know – you could see their ‘special’ as chosen by the people), calories, user rating / feedback. Having a simple board to rate menu items (with a sticker system) would be fun and interactive. Moreover, you could take suggestions from your customers, where people opt for it to be on next weeks menu. These are simple “web sensibilities” that people are beginning to expect in the offline world, so why not at lunch, in a cafe?

Waiting times. These can generally be guessed at and understood. 12:30 – 1:30 is going to be busy. That’s ‘lunch time’. However, lunch ‘shops’ are often very bad at providing tell tale signs of waiting times.

Solution : Leisure/theme parks inform people of waiting times for rides really well. They tell you waiting times, physically, by embedding it in the queue!

Lunch shops don’t do
this because I guess some things take longer to process than other
things. You can’t measure waiting times well enough. Although Subway
have got their sandwich processing down to a fine art (and a lengthy
training programme). They can do it. So others should be able to
to. People would then be able to make better informed decisions about
whether to get their lunch there. You could then have two ‘streams’ -
one for custom orders and one for ready made ‘standard’ orders.

It’d be good to have your feedback on this. Have you seen other solutions, internet sensibilities being catered for… Where you go for lunch, and how do you manage communal office lunching?

Update: We’ve just come across Nike Playmaker, a web service that helps you to organise football matches by sending out invites to friends, selecting a pitch, and tracking responses. Seems pretty similar to what we were suggesting for a lunch-organising service.

Playmaker also supports text message reminders and post-match ‘banter’. Pretty nice. Services like this help to make organising social events that bit easier. They might also remove some of the stigma of ‘being the officious person who does all the organising’, as the website becomes the entity that nags people with reminders, rather than you.

This video does a good job of explaining the Playmaker service: