Toast's digital storefront suite is a comprehensive platform designed to empower restaurants with fully customizable websites, online ordering, and customer engagement tools. It enables restaurants to create customized digital storefronts that seamlessly integrate with their existing operations and other Toast products.
My Role:
Alongside research, design, product and engineering partners, I lead the strategic vision and end-to-end design experience of guest-facing and customer-facing experiences for Websites, Online Ordering, and the branded app (currently in beta) for Digital Storefront.
My Team:
2 product managers, 2 designers
The challenge:
Initially, the concept of a website editor was designed to cater to customers interested in building websites. Across our range of products, our guest-facing experiences should maintain consistent branding. Our aim is to offer customers a seamlessly integrated platform that empowers them to deliver top-notch guest experiences, aligning with their brand identity.
Building multiple products meant we were maintaining multiple admin experiences. Despite the intention for these experiences to share branding configurations, there was a notable lack of cohesion. It felt as though they're not part of the same platform, and that hindered the unified brand experience.
Before: Online Ordering Admin, Websites editor, branded app admin
Another pain point we wanted to address in the website editor was the lack of cohesion in the site's style and theme elements - a user had to click into another page to update these styles which were applied globally to their site, with little context.
Before
The Solution:
To improve these pain points and present Digital Storefront as a seamless and unified experience for customers, some updates we made to the editing experience were introducing multi-product editing to our websites editor, and moving the site style and theme configurations within context in the editor.
The future vision is to enable customers to switch between products in a mult-product editing experience. See below.
After [Future vision]
Site style elements within the editor (left) and multi-product editing (right)
After: Branded app admin refresh in the editor
After: Online Ordering configurations in the editor
Bringing Online Ordering into the editor was a collaboration between myself and another designer who worked hard to design a system with design patterns that we could share to maintain consistency and a unified experience.
Some other updates to the editing experience we implemented were drag & drop, grids, and composable modules for a more intuitive editing experience.
