Decision-grade research before a major product investment
A hospitality management platform saw underwhelming adoption of a new offering — and couldn't tell whether the problem was value, usability, or discovery. We led a two-touchpoint mixed-methods study that turned the debate into an evidence-based decision.
This was a commercial engagement delivered by the team behind This Waay. It is presented as relevant experience for public-systems work — not as a government contract reference.
Context
The client's platform helps hospitality businesses manage and promote their menus and inventory. Its flagship menu experience was beloved — but an adjacent menu-management capability lagged behind, and a newly launched data-and-insights offering had seen an underwhelming reception.
Before investing further, the team needed to understand what operators actually expected from the underserved capability — and whether an upgraded experience was something the market genuinely demanded.
We designed a two-touchpoint research plan: a quantitative survey delivered through a site intercept to reach operators at scale, followed by remote moderated interviews with the owners and operators who fit the target profile. The combination let us size the opportunity and understand the "why" behind it.
We led the research end to end — plan, instruments, recruiting, moderation, and synthesis — and translated the findings into prioritized actions with supporting design concepts.
Methodologies
- Quantitative survey via site intercept
- Remote moderated semi-structured interviews
- Segmentation and target profiling
- Behavioral theme analysis
- Demand and value exploration
- Insight-to-action concept design
Deliverables
- Research plan and instruments
- Survey findings segmented by business type
- Interview insights and behavioral themes
- Evidence-based answers to the core investment questions
- Prioritized feature themes with design concepts
- Readout aligning product, design, and leadership
Adoption signals alone couldn't distinguish "not valuable" from "not usable" from "not discovered."
The team had a hypothesis — operators wanted better tools for an underserved part of their work — but no direct evidence about how important the capability was, how operators handled it today, or whether demand justified the investment. Guessing wrong was expensive in both directions: polishing an offering nobody wanted, or abandoning one that just needed clearer footing.
Two research questions framed the entire engagement:
- What do operators currently expect from this capability?
- Is an upgraded experience something the market genuinely demands?
Answering credibly meant reaching the right people — not all users of the platform, but the businesses whose operations genuinely depended on the capability — without over-indexing on the loudest voices or the most convenient anecdotes.
The survey sized the opportunity. The interviews explained it.
The site-intercept survey confirmed the target audience was real and material: for a substantial share of the customer base, the capability touched a meaningful portion of their operations, and most were updating their information weekly — many daily.
Moderated interviews with owners and operators then revealed how the work actually happened day to day:
- Updates happened constantly, from every kind of device, usually in under five minutes and at the moment a change occurred
- Many operators managed the work in outside tools — word processors, design apps, point-of-sale and delivery platforms — because the in-product experience didn't cover them
- Operators were keenly aware of the gap between the platform's polished flagship experience and everything else
The expectation was unambiguous: operators experience this work as one holistic activity, and they wanted every part of it managed in one place, at one consistent standard of quality.
Research only earns its cost when it changes what gets built.
We translated the findings into a clear answer on both research questions — the need was real, already being met through workarounds, and demand supported investment. And a caution: these capabilities were trending toward baseline expectations, meaning inaction carried competitive risk.
To make the direction tangible, we paired the prioritized themes with design concepts, each grounded in an observed behavior so the "why" behind every recommendation traced back to evidence:
- Streamlined day-to-day updates that preserve operators' customized information rather than discarding it
- Parity across every part of the workflow, at the standard the flagship experience set
- The customization control operators were leaving the platform to find elsewhere
- Integrations meeting the reality that operators' information now lives in multiple systems
The team moved from debating opinions to prioritizing evidence.
- A validated target audience, sized from real data rather than assumption
- A confident, evidence-based answer on demand — and on the competitive risk of standing still
- A prioritized feature direction with concepts ready for roadmap planning
- A repeatable research pattern the team could run again for future decisions
Just as importantly, the work reframed the original adoption question: operators valued the offering, but the system hadn't yet met the holistic way they actually work.
Before investing in a program, know which problem you actually have.
Public agencies face this exact question constantly: when a service is under-used, is it a value problem, a usability problem, or an awareness problem? The gap between eligible and enrolled has the same three explanations — and each implies a very different investment.
A few weeks of mixed-methods discovery — quantitative reach plus qualitative depth, aimed at the people whose lives the service actually touches — turns a program debate into a program decision. That is precisely the discovery-study pattern California's own digital service teams run before committing to a build.
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