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Toast Restaurant Card
Providing restaurant owners instant access to daily sales
🏢 Company
Toast
🗓 Duration
10 months (2021)
👨🏻💻 Role
Design lead
🧐 Responsibilities
Research, Product Strategy, UX, UI
👨👩👧👧 Team
PM, UX researcher, Engineers, Legal, QA
INTRODUCTION
Many SMB (Small-Mid sized business) restaurant owners have cash flow constraints. To give restaurant owners a greater cash flow, I led the product for a year from concept to launch a business debit account and card that provides instant access to their daily sales at no cost.
MY ROLE
As the Lead product designer, it was my responsibility to build relationships with restaurant owners and identify product opportunities.
I worked collaboratively with PM, Engineers, UX researcher, Marketing, and Legal throughout the product development process to ultimately launch MVP on November 17th, 2021 at the annual Toast Spark event.
PROBLEMS
Originally, restaurant owners needed to wait 1-2 business days for their sales to settle in their external bank accounts. Many restaurant owners sought instant access to cash flow through Toast Capital loan with interest fees to make ends meet.
Also, if payment issues arose, customers were often unclear whether Toast or their external bank account was responsible. Then, customers would contact the company’s support team for help, and only to be told that the other their external bank account was likely responsible.
SOLUTION
Provide restaurant owners instant access to sales exclusively through the Toast Restaurant Card that can function as their primary operating account. Toast Restaurant Card offers a greater cash flow without the hassle of users relying on loans and encountering payment issues.
IMPACT
Toast Restaurant Card was hugely popular with SMB (Small-Mid sized business) restaurant owners. These were the main three impacts we witnessed that validated the success of product market fit.
PROCESS
VALIDATE PRODUCT MARKET FIT
Sr. UX researcher and I collaboratively conducted surveys and interviewed restaurant owners to develop relationships with them. By doing so, I was able to define feature sets that would help them achieve financial tasks to run their business.
👉🏼 69% of restaurants are interested in obtaining a Toast Restaurant Card to get faster access to daily sales at no cost.
👉🏼 Restaurant owners’ primary financial tasks are managing various expenses on multiple dates. They have often failed to make payments on time due to cash flow constraints.
👉🏼 Restaurant owners were concerned with the burdensome process of filling out lengthy paperwork and form to set up their new bank account with Toast.
👉🏼 Restaurant owners were concerned with the cumbersome experience of
replacing their external bank accounts.
DESIGN WORKSHOP
Support from restaurant owners helped me convince product management and stakeholders to start the development process. Then, I led a team design workshop in which participants (engineers and PMs) and I collaboratively prioritized users' pain points and define feature sets for MVP.
BUSINESS GOALS & METRICS
🎯 Number of Toast Restaurant Card activations
🎯 Interchange revenue (revenue generated from money spent on card)
🎯 Interest on deposits
🎯Other fees (additional revenue streams from using the card)
🎯 Churn rate
DESIGN PRINCIPLES & FEATURES FOR MVP
Based on the outcome of the design workshop, I spoke to restaurant owners to determine how Toast Restaurant Card would function. Three product features and design principles for MVP emerged from those conversations:
🚀 Quick sign-up process:
Design a fast and simple sign-up process so that restaurant owners don’t need to distress daunting banking paperwork and lengthy forms.
🚀 Transfer of funds:
Design an intuitive fund transfer experience to help them achieve financial tasks so that they run their business seamlessly.
🚀 Cashback offers and rewards:
Utilize restaurant-specific rewards programs as a powerful tool to incentive them to sign up in return for going through the cumbersome experience of switching bank accounts.
FINAL DESIGN
FAST SIGNUP IN MINUTES
Restaurant owners can set their Toast Restaurant Card up online in minutes. A standard onboarding form for restaurant owners has between 40-60 data fields that need to be filled in. With the goal to ease and simplify the signup process, it simply asks the users to confirm and verify their business information to sign up.
DASHBOARD - Easily navigate features in the time of need
1. Prioritize the experience around available balance so that users can make transactions (spend money) and transfer funds
.
2. Structure features into snippets for users to navigate directly to various features in the time of need at a glance.
TRANSFER FUNDS FOR FINANCIAL TASKS
Restaurant owners are able to pay bills and move funds to seamlessly run their business.
Sales deposited to Toast Restaurant Card are immediately ready to send and transfer on time with two flexible payment options with no fees: bank transfer and check.
TURN EVERY SPENDING INTO REWARDS
Restaurant owners have access to automatic cashback rewards experience that helps maximize their spend return. All restaurant-specific cashback rewards are automatically enrolled and redeemed directly into their Toast Restaurant Card effortlessly so that they can never spend without earning again.
🚀 LAUNCH 🚀
On November 17th 2021, we launched Toast Restaurant Card to a set of early access customers at the annual Toast Spark event. After we succeeded in validating the product market fit, we started building relationships with a wider audience. This helped our team to prioritize our backlogs and refine the product that could accommodate business goals and a wider market. I’m excited to see where we as a team could take it from here.
Thank you!
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