Neptune is the fastest and easiest way to split and pay your bills at restruants.
Neptune is the fastest and easiest way to split and pay your bills at restruants.
Objective
Creating a restaurant payment experience where customers can easily tap into an app to see their bills and checkout within a minute. Now, customers no longer need to wait for the waiter or waitress and they can simply split amongst friends, pay and leave!
Role
Ideation
UX & UI & Interaction Designer
Activities
UI Design
Information Architecture
Prototyping
Market research
Pitching the idea to potential investors
Marketing video production
Tools
Figma
Protopie
Sketch
Team
Three teammates including myself, Rani Kim, and Fabian Scheiwiller
Achivement
It was a beautiful day at work and my collagues and I decided to have lunch toghether. After having a good meal and lots of chatting, we noticed it’s been already over an hour and work is calling.
The previous scenario where customers are waiting for their bill happens very often and it can even take longer than 15 minutes during peak hours. We did extensive market research in Europe, Asia, and Canada and found the same struggles everywhere.
In Tokyo, people still pay by cash a lot! In many smaller restaurants, cards are not accepted but you can find restaurants which use machines at the entrance where guests can pay by themselves when they leave. This can free waiters from cashing in and out however there are following pros and cons:
After building a high fidelity prototype of the app, we reach out to restaurants and got permission to test our product
with the customers of the restaurants. With the study, we not only received positive reactions from the users but
also gained very important insights:
In order to make our product successful and make it really useful for our users, the product needs to be available in any restaurant around the world.
For us, this means that the solution has to be easy to adapt and implement in any restaurant's service flow at a low cost. The new solution shouldn't change too much in how a restaurant or a waiter works since the fluctuation rate in waiters is high it's important for the new system to have a low learning curve.
With Neptune, people can easily make their payment whenever they are ready without any hassle or wait time.
Customers can now check their bill on their app and can even easily split bills with their friends whenever they want.
Neptune also helps our restaurants to learn more about our customers and servers can just focus on the most important
mission - providing the best experience for the customers.
We want the restaurant experience to be more meaningful and less waiting. Eat and pay with Neptune now. ✌️
A promotion video showing the experience in a restaurant environment.
To provide fast and simple payment experience, we wanted to make sure that users are able to enter the restaurant and pick up our app for the first time and immediately understand the flow of the app.
The Neptune flow is as following: Guests enter the restaurant and take a seat at a table where they can order directly from waiters as usual. A QR code can be found attached to every table. By scanning the QR code with the Neptune app, the order and the current spendings will be shown on the app (once the waiter has punched it ino the cashier system) and updates as you continue to order. Guests can enjoy their meal and pay at any given time within the app.
Click to enlarge
Waiters will receive a notification once the meal has been paid and the guests are good to go.
When it comes to payment, a user can use stored credit cards, Apple Pay or Neptune credits. A user can store multiple cards like business or private cards and easily switch between them.
Tipping became super simple, just press the tip area and choose between suggested tips or others and users will immediately see the tip and the total amount.
Users can also rate and provide feedback to the restaurants.
In addition to the Cashier Side-Cick, waiters can use a smartwatch to get table information on their wrist so that they can check orders at any time.
Waiters will get notified when a customer has paid or wishes to order more. The UI is minimal and designed to make each table easy to find and interact with.
Waiters also have the option to close the table on their watch.
Benefits for restaurant owners
Keep the good things
Initially, we thought about providing a platform where users can also directly make orders from the app. However, after talking to many restaurant and visitors, we learned that the dining experience completes with the waiter and waitress services and recommendations. Moreover, we believe that as much as automation with upcoming technology is exciting, it is important to be mindful and provide spaces for people in the service industry.
