How to turn restaurant owners into professional web designers

BentoBox is a marketing and commerce platform for restaurants. Our digital platform gives restaurant owners and operators direct control of the tools they need to drive more success.

Background & Goal

BentoBox would like to expand its total addressable market by revamping its flagship website builder. Our goal is to improve design flexibility and facilitate more independence for restaurants to design their websites themselves.

Internal interviews revealed some key insights for our Next Gen website builder

• Our structured pages (menu pages, private event pages, etc) are too rigid—any piece of content should be able to go on any page

• Section names should be more economical, and reflect their purpose on the page, not their layout.

These two insights turned our focus to the building block content a customer would want to add to a page. The feedback about naming conventions made us realize we should engage our customers for what naming conventions might make sense to them.

Methods

We used an Open Card Sort in moderated interviews with both customers and folks from our onboarding teams (2 web designers + 2 onboarding managers)

We reached out to ~40 customers in key metropolitan markets (NYC, San Francisco, Philadelphia). We narrowed our list to 6 participants.

Participants were presented with numerous content sections in a Figjam board. We instructed participants to review the different styles and sort them into groups. We then asked how they would name these categories.

Key Learnings

As we analyzed the card sorts, we found customers sorted by what the content was meant to do. Example: the customer didn’t really see difference between a split panel or a full bleed if they had all the same content.

This pattern differed from internal teams, which sorted more by the layout (split panel with split panel), which reflected our existing structures.

This insight helped us understand that to support a page builder where customers could serve themselves, we’d need to think about the purpose of content first before thinking about the layout. We then created a list of names for “Flexible Content” based on what customers generated. Finally we created a prototype for how to change the layouts within these content types.

Building Blocks (Flexible Content)

• Call to Action

• Features

• FAQ

• Gallery

• Form

• Testimonial