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. Lounge access was restricted for most of the project, so stakeholder discussions and journey mapping happened remotely.

01 Research

Understanding the landscape

To understand the current setup at the lounge, I reached out to lounge staff and subject matter experts. Given the entry restrictions at the time, most of this was done virtually. I also looked at other F&B apps and websites, 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 the dish details screen and a preference-selection step in the ordering flow.

Customers wanted their dietary preferences remembered as it was already in their flight profile. That meant extra backend integration costs. With Covid's duration still unknown, it was hard to justify building for this need. Instead we used static allergen tags on the dish details screen.

02 Mapping the journey

From arrival to pickup

I ran a remote workshop with the team to map how visitors, lounge staff, and the kitchen would each experience the future solution, and where the dependencies between each actor lie. 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

Wireflowing let us visualise the flow, from the moment the user scans the QR code to the point they have their dish, including the filter flow, edge cases, and checking order status afterward.

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 lost track of their order after closing the browser during testing. We fixed this two ways.

QR codes on tables capture the guest's table number at access, so staff can locate them directly when delivering the meal.
The order number saves to the browser via cookie. Reopening the url on the same device picks the visitor's active order. A manual order number entry screen stayed in as a fallback.

Since the sessions ran remotely, we ran the prototype Wizard of Oz style, manually updating order confirmations and status screens behind the scenes to match each participant's actual choices. Seeing their own order on screen kept the session feeling real.

06 Solution

Now Serving

The finished experience lets you browse what's available, order to your table, and track your meal from confirmation through to collection, without touching a shared surface or shared utensils. It's built as a responsive, mobile-first layout.

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.

4.6/5

average satisfaction rating across the feedback module, after the solution had run for over 1 year.

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, and menu management. The guest ordering flow was the visible layer, these were what made it operable at the lounge. The feedback module routed input across different aspects of the lounge experience to the relevant teams.

Next steps & reflection

What this taught me

Redesigning a premium experience lounge guests were already used to, while meeting the safety needs Covid introduced, was the real challenge.

Most of this happened without access to the lounge itself, which reinforced how much can still be learned through focused conversations with the people who work in a space every day, even without observing it directly.

Covid ended before this reached a v2, so the rollout was eventually retired from the main lounge area. The system stayed in use in a smaller, more premium section, though. 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