About Researchers and Chefs
In 2004, British TV put a chef to visit terrible restaurants and help those restaurants get back on track. The challenge was to transform those performing poorly into successful cases in a week, the Kitchen Nightmares.
Gordon Ramsay didn’t have that frowning character that made him famous on American TV (although every phrase that came out of his mouth contained a little swearing). The budget must have been low, by the way, the first season is filmed (no restaurant renovation), which made everything much more realistic and less show business.
This weekend I finally found all the episodes to watch, and I concluded that good chefs have, among all the hats they wear, a researcher soul. I’ll tell you why.
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The first thing he does is to interview and get to know the whole team. He is looking into understanding the relationships, personal goals and capabilities of the team.
He does a product and service evaluation by eating everything on the menu as a client (those are hilarious, my favourite part).
Then he has a very design-centred approach, making small changes in the menu or the team and testing it with current customers.
Here comes the best part. He picks the food and tests it with potential consumers around the neighbourhood. During the conversation, he asks questions about the food but also investigates the previous experience people had with the restaurant.
Simple, effective and full of insights.
Then he takes into consideration everything he learnt and proposes changes to the business. He provides training, guidance and support for this.
The last piece of the show is to test the new changes with a restaurant full of people, where Gordon collects CSATs scores and feedback, closing the cycle to measure the impact.
Summarizing the Kitchen Nightmares process in UX/Design Research lingo:
- Interviews with stakeholders
- Heuristic evaluation
- Action plan
- Low-fi prototype
- Moderate usability test
- Concept testing/discovery
- hi-fi prototype
- Usability test in scale with no moderation
- Metrics for measuring impact, ROI and success rate.
