Prototyping and Lonestar Taco
Back in April I attended the TYPOSF conference (which I highly recommend) and one theme that ran through a lot of the talks was the move towards a rapid, incremental prototyping process with a collaborative team. Developing and running Lonestar Taco has been a very similar process. I'm mostly used to designing in the medium of the web, so it's been an interesting change of pace to work on systems in a more physical realm.
The same principles apply regardless - gathering and defining requirements, designing solutions, implementing, gathering feedback, iterating. This time though it's entirely our vision, and it feels a little funny to be in the client chair at the same time as the designer role. It's definitely harder to get perspective, so it's even more important to listen to our customers.
New Amsterdam Market gave us a chance to roll out our prototype, from the menu, the organization of the ordering line, food prep and cooking logistics, pricing, sourcing, even our social media. Every week we assessed how things went and took note of what we could improve. Sometimes it was something as simple as positioning the cooler parallel to the grill rather than perpendicular. Other times, it was realizing that propane tanks don't do so well in really cold weather and figuring out how we could adapt. We ended up creating a line of retail products that didn't require on-site cooking and selling tamales that could be kept hot on an electric induction burner.
As in all prototyping, we gathered as much customer and team feedback as possible. We had many variables to take into account - how much was rain responsible for variation in sales? How could we increase our capacity while decrease wait time but not sacrifice quality? And how could we ensure that we were meeting our bottom line? What items were the most popular and did we price them right? There's very thin line between customers feeling like they received value for their money and being perceived as too expensive. We also made sure to talk through feedback from our team, and they always had insightful suggestions that allowed us to make incremental improvements every day.
Although we've always been clear about our overall vision for Lonestar, it hasn't always been easy to figure out the immediate form that it should take. After last season, we collected a ton of information that is helping us with the next iteration. We're altering the design of the menu and offerings to make it easier for customers to make decisions and to streamline our service. We're focused on securing a permanent kitchen for ourselves - although the initial outlay will be larger than last season, the gains in our ability to produce food, hire staff and making our products more readily available to our customers will enable us to be a sustainable and profitable business.
Another point from the TYPO conference that resonated with me was the fact that nothing is ever "done", you always have opportunities to improve. And that has been so true with Lonestar Taco. Of course we all have days where we felt like we fell short but it was most important to get our idea out there to give people a chance to kick the tires. I'm excited that we're returning to New Amsterdam Market this Sunday to put some of our improvements to the test and to see all of our regulars.
