SilverKris Lounge digital menu

Background & challenge

When Covid-19 hit, the lounge's self-serve buffet posed two clear risks: visitors sharing common utensils and surfaces, and crowding around shared serving areas.

Our goal was to design a safer solution, while retaining the premium experience lounge visitors were accustomed to. Most of this, including stakeholder discussions and journey mapping, had to happen remotely, with lounge access itself restricted for most of the project.

01 — Research

Understanding the current setup

To understand the current setup at the lounge, I reached out to lounge staff and subject matter experts, remotely: entry restrictions meant most of this had to happen without physically being there.

Benchmarking

I looked at other F&B apps and websites (Grab, Foodpanda, Deliveroo), as well as restaurants that had started adopting digital menus.

Highlights from stakeholder discussions

Dietary preferences as well as allergies are important to customers: this shaped both the allergen tags on every dish card and a preference-selection step in the ordering flow.

Customers also wanted dietary preferences pulled automatically from their flight profile. That meant real backend integration cost, with Covid's duration still unknown, hard to justify building for a need that might not last. It stayed on the post-MVP list; static allergen tags on the dish cards covered the need for now.

This research was also informed by an internal study on how the virus could spread through shared buffet surfaces and utensils, which I presented to stakeholders to help build the case for redesigning the experience.

02 — Mapping the journey

From arrival to pickup

With the team, I ran a remote workshop to map how visitors, lounge staff, and the kitchen would each experience the future solution, and where those three actors actually depend on one another. The one real branch point is at pickup: during Covid the lounge was quiet enough that self-collection was the default, though staff sometimes delivered to the table directly when they had the bandwidth. That flexibility was more about how things played out on the floor.

Highlights

Knowing the preparation time would be important, so visitors can head to the gate on time.

Staff capture each visitor's departure time at check-in, so they can proactively flag it if a visitor is at risk of missing their flight.

03 — Storyboarding

Bringing the solution to life for stakeholders

Storyboards of the to-be solution were created to help stakeholders envision the experience.

Scenario

Rachel is on her way to Poland, she has a couple of hours before her flight. She would like to have a snack & finish reading a chapter in her book at the SilverKris Lounge.

04 — User flow

From QR scan to meal pickup

By wireflowing we could visualise the flow, from where the user scans the QR code till the point they have their dish.

05 — Prototyping & testing

Testing at the lounge, and beyond it

An interactive prototype was created to test on participants. They were given 2 tasks.

1. To select a meal from the menu and proceed to order it.

2. To check their order status assuming they had closed their browser.

Key insight from testing

Users couldn't recall their order number after closing the browser in task 2. As a solution, we placed QR codes on tables to let customers access the digital menu while capturing their table number, letting the server locate them when delivering their meal.

Because the moderated sessions ran remotely, we updated the prototype behind the scenes so order confirmations and status screens reflected each participant's actual earlier choices in the flow. Participants ended up reacting to their own order on screen, which kept the sessions grounded in something real.

06 — Solution

Now Serving

The finished experience: browse what's available, order to your table, and track your meal from confirmation through to collection, without touching a shared menu or utensils. Built with a responsive, mobile-first layout that also works on landscape tablets.

Closing the browser mid-wait was a real usability finding in testing. The fix: the order number is saved to the browser via cookie, so reopening the site on the same device picks the visitor straight back up, no re-entry needed. A manual "enter order number" screen stayed in as a fallback, for checking status from a different device, like a companion's phone or the front desk looking someone up.

Outcomes

Right feature, safer lounge

Shipped during Covid-19, the digital menu reduced the risk of virus exposure while dining at the lounge, letting visitors get their food without touching the shared menu, utensils, or serving area the original buffet used.

90%

of lounge visitors who ordered food or drink used the digital menu.

Beyond the guest-facing app, I also designed the staff-facing systems the digital menu depended on to actually run: an order management system, server dashboard, customer feedback module, inventory management, and menu management. The guest ordering flow was the visible layer; these were what made it operable at the lounge. The feedback module ran for over a year, routing feedback across different aspects of the lounge experience to the relevant teams; overall satisfaction held at 4.6 out of 5 across that period.

Next steps & reflection

What this taught me

The redesign needed to keep the lounge feeling premium without physical contact. That made trust as much a design problem as the menu itself, since visitors could easily read the change as a downgrade forced by the pandemic.

Testing showed participants couldn't recall their order number after closing the browser, a reminder that flows have to be designed around how people actually behave. Putting a QR code on each table let the system locate the customer directly, without requiring them to remember a number.

A few things came up during design that didn't make it into the MVP but are worth naming. Modifying an order already in the kitchen (adding another dish mid-prep) needs the order management system to support appending to a live order rather than only creating a new one, so it's flagged as a post-MVP capability this build doesn't attempt. There's also a version of the QR-per-table fix that could go further: if a visitor's device already holds a session from scanning table A4, scanning a different table's QR later could be detected as the same visitor having moved, and used to prompt a table update automatically instead of relying on them to remember to tap "Change."

Running most of this remotely, with the lounge itself off-limits for stretches of the project, also reinforced how much can still be learned through focused conversations with the people who work in a space every day, even without being able to observe it directly.

Covid ended before this reached a v2. The main-lounge rollout was eventually retired, but the system stayed in use in a smaller, more premium section of the lounge; the contactless convenience it was built for turned out to be worth keeping once the original safety need had passed.

Redesigning SilverKris Lounge dining for a contactless world