With UrbanPiper powering thousands of restaurants all over the world and an ever-increasing number of daily active users, we can fairly say that we are way out of our days of figuring out the product-market fit. Now it's time to take on bigger challenges and to create something brand new
Quint is short for "Quintessential" - the name of the most beloved product in our entire product suite. It has been the beating heart of UrbanPiper's internal teams - operations, onboarding, and customer success. It's heavily used by business owners and their executive teams. It's an all-in-one content management system - whether you want to update the price of an item, run a festival discount, add a new tax/charge to an item, publish your catalog to aggregators, or update store timings amongst a plethora of needs, Quint has been the answer.
If one should compare UrbanPiper's products, to the Iron Man suits , then Quint is the first version of suit that Tony Stark built in the Afghan caves during his struggle for survival. As such, the underlying tech, design and functionality of Quint was limited to what we could muster during those days of learning and searching for product market fit. Even to this day, Quint simply works, a grand old warhorse that never gives up. But there's only so much entropy and change that she could withstand.
Just to put things into perspective, Quint has stayed with UrbanPiper all along the way - from loyalty to white label apps & websites, to our Hub platform. It endured the rise of online order aggregators and delivery apps in the F&B industry across the world. Heck, it even survived the tumultuous times of COVID. But, in the meantime, all the pivots and the quick manoeuvres we made to adjust our product line to the rapidly changing F&B landscape are now weighing her down.
The older tech stack that powers Quint hampers our ability to build and ship features at the same pace in which the F&B industry is evolving. All the feature additions and removals over time have caused the user experience to become overly complex and the user interface lacks a modern touch and feel. On top of this, we need ways to introduce cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning into the product so business owners can leverage valuable data at their end and turn it into actionable insights to boost their sales and operations.
Now with UrbanPiper powering thousands of restaurants all over the world and an ever-increasing number of daily active users, we can fairly say that we are way out of our days of figuring out the product-market fit. Now it's time to take on bigger challenges and to create something brand new. Something that brings the power of our product suite closer to restaurant entrepreneurs, gives them superpowers and allows them to achieve their goals to the fullest potential.
For the past year we've been working towards that goal and the result of it is the all-new Atlas.
Here's what makes Atlas so awesome and truly an heir worthy of Quint's mighty legacy.
We focused heavily on design while building Atlas. Our single focus, 'the north star' of our entire effort, was to achieve simplicity. The UI components/interfaces we introduced into the new Atlas portal are not just mere eye candy. They drastically reduce the cognitive effort it takes to perform your day to day tasks.
There are several moving parts in your restaurant's online business that are heavily interconnected. Performing a simple action such as applying a tax for certain items at certain locations or troubleshooting an issue with one particular order involves multiple entities you have to trace from one part of the application to the other. In Quint, every new entity used to open up into a new page, and to retain context/mapping, most users tended to open the page in a new tab (like opening hyperlinks in an article in a new tab). This led to the user juggling between numerous tabs, often loosing context on how everything is tied together. We've faced that frustration ourselves, several times within our own operations and support teams.
Solve most of problems on the same page and avoid a new one, because the page refresh and forwarding can lead to change blindness, in addition to disrupting the user's mental flow.
With this design principle in mind, in the all new Atlas, additional interactions or content related to interconnected entities (eg: taxes, charges, locations etc.) are overlaid in a layer above the current entity's page (eg: an item's detail). For example, when you are trying to look up the percentage applied for a tax on an item, and then check at which locations the tax is being applied, you'll never have to leave the page and you'll see all the connections in a neat graphical representation. It brings forth a user experience that lets you breeze through various sections of the Atlas portal, much like your super speedy dosa master working his wizardry during the peak hours.
Atlas lets you update the content of your store catalog with an interface that gives you the end consumer's point for view. While editing your store catalog, you'll never ever have to wonder...
Did I set the item sort order correctly to show my bestsellers on top?
Did I set my chef's special items to be shown as recommended items?
Are the prices & markup-prices properly configured for items?
As you keep updating and saving the store catalog, the view you get is nearly identical to the interface you see on most food ordering apps. So in short, you see what your customers will see. You can see the effect of changes you make in real-time without having to publish your catalog to aggregators and hope you got it all right.
Advanced filter and search operations are provided in every single interface to improve your menu and store management experience. In Quint, search and filter were limited to name and IDs. However in Atlas, search and filter is possible on a wide range of properties - such as price range of an item, or the location of a particular store, and more.
Business owners can now track their business performance across different channels (aggregators such as Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, or more) & across different categories (store, channel, city, item category, etc) for different periods of time. This empowers business owners identify trends/patterns and plan for the future, enabling true dynamic data-driven decision making.
Further, identify bottlenecks in order handling using the operations analytics and improve your RHI (Restaurant health index). Improve your customer experience and reduce cancellations.
So far, UrbanPiper has helped you with effortlessly turning the knobs and controls of your restaurant's online business from a single dashboard, but from now on, we can even help you in figuring out the right knobs to turn.
Make small adjustments to your catalog or store settings, measure the changes in KPIs of your business to figure out what works and what doesn't work, then iterate to achieve the perfect mix for your business. Achieve your desired growth with data driven decisions during every iteration. Ensure that the standards and goals set by you are being adhered to by your restaurant staff or operators.
Watch out for more updates from this space. There's much more to come in Atlas analytics, including predictive analytics.
Easily onboard your staff through email invites and manage their access to various sections of Atlas based on their respective roles in your organisation (marketing, operations, support, sales, etc). If there's a change in role or addition of new responsibilities for an employee, simply update their access to corresponding modules by updating roles against their user account on Atlas. In the event of their resignation or termination, easily revoke access to the Atlas portal.
All these upgrades in Atlas are a culmination of our years of operating and using Quint on a daily basis. Every detail, every button, and every form field has been meticulously thought through. In creating the all-new Atlas, we have truly kept the customer's needs first and created an experience that is intuitive, enabling users to utilise the product capabilities to its maximum potential. We certainly hope you enjoy working with Atlas as much as we enjoyed building it. Atlas will be more accessible to our regular users and increases the productivity of our power users.
While these are mostly the changes that have happened on the outside, there have been revolutionary changes made on the inside as well, or the technology stack that powers Atlas. Stay tuned for an 'under the hood' walkthrough of the Atlas tech stack from our Engineering team. We have set the stage with Atlas, to bring in evolving technologies like machine learning and big data storage solutions to enable you to navigate the online F&B landscape with relative certainty. Watch out for many more exciting features in the near future that will be rolled out at a rapid pace thanks to Atlas's underlying modern & robust tech stack.
That's all for now. It's time for the all new Atlas to stand on its own two feet.
