The contextual inquiry/user interviews were really for gathering a clear view of the production process. I was able to build a solid foundation for what this application needed to do, but more than that I was able to see how they are currently successful. Every one of Tom’s team was incredibly passionate about their work and they used their years of experience to make decisions on the fly in the constantly shifting demands of a commercial kitchen. This application needs to track all of the custom order nuances, while still giving the prep cooks some amount of autonomy. If this tool turned their job into a paint by numbers exercise it would be a failure.
*rubs hands together*
Mapping out all of the input collected helps me to get my hands around the building blocks of the project, and provides a great talking point for discussions with the developer. I will walk through this map with Tom to verify that we both see the general process in the same way and to make sure that I didn’t miss any major input points. I will take his feedback and the developer and use that to build a feature list.