About ezCater
ezCater is a U.S.-based corporate catering platform that connects businesses with a nationwide network of restaurants and caterers. Companies use ezCater to order group meals for everything from significant events to everyday team lunches, while the platform manages restaurant discovery, ordering, logistics, and delivery coordination.
ezManage is ezCater's centralized catering-management platform for restaurant and catering partners, functioning as a single operational command center for running their catering business. Through ezManage, providers can accept and manage orders from the ezCater marketplace, phone, or online channels; coordinate delivery and dispatch; and track all past, current, and upcoming orders in real time. The platform also offers performance analytics, financial reporting, and payment breakdowns, customer review visibility, marketing tools, and operational controls such as store hours and capacity management, giving partners complete visibility and control over their catering operations in one cohesive system.
Challenge
At the end of 2024, I was delegated an additional domain to oversee. This domain housed the entire Supply and Operations product teams. After learning about the core products, product partners, business metrics, and customer insights, I compiled a backlog of design debt for ezManage—ezCater's core product for restaurant partner management.
This included a complete redesign of the core ezManage's navigation. The reason for prioritizing this design debt over others is that it was the foundation for the other problems across ezManage. If we build a solid foundation for navigation and searchability, then several different areas of design debt would be addressed.
All of the reports supported six teams across the Supply domain, so I took the lead on design debt. I started with a light competitive analysis and used my researchers to define opportunities and roles based on a survey and follow-up interviews. We learned that our restaurant partners found it challenging to complete several tasks and locate essential metrics. ezManage was cumbersome. Some links in the navigation took them away from the ezManage experience to other places, and they didn't know how to navigate back to the core product. Our goal was to redesign the navigation to reduce time spent on core tasks and improve findability.
Solution
Our solution was to conduct an audit of the core ezManage experience, understand the frequency and usage of links and pages, and bucket items into a jobs framework, i.e., core jobs, secondary jobs, etc. I redesigned the navigation so that all links are on the left side of the page in our ezNav. I removed the tabs across the top and inserted them into collapsible buckets within the ezNav under these core jobs: daily operations, business insights, engage customers, manage accounts, and support and resources. This made findability extremely easy and logical.
I ran a usability test with 50 restaurant partners. I asked each restaurant partner to complete five tasks. The results were outstanding, with a 32% reduction in task time. Our partners didn't even ask where the tabs were at the top of each page; they naturally used the ezNav for all navigation.
Contribution
As my reports were contributing their time fully to the six teams across Supply and Operations, I was the lead designer on this project. I orchestrated the design debt across our core products, appointed researchers to support survey and interview needs, conducted design exploration, and collaborated with engineering partners to implement this across ezManage.
Simultaneously, while this project was underway, my team was building our design system. A significant part of the design system exploration was to determine whether we wanted to continue splitting our products across multiple themes based on user types. I used this project as a testing ground for this exploration. I needed to confirm if we could unify our brand across all themes into a single ezCater theme. This would make our design system and engineering component library easier to update, as it works with a centralized, governed system.
Additionally, the lead engineer and I on the design systems team were exploring new code frameworks. We used this project to validate the use of a combined engineering stack of ShadCN, Tapas, and Tailwind. With much success, we validated both use cases and set the foundation for our new Ingredients Design System.
+95%
-32%
100%
