Information accessibility is a key aspect in this consumption focused global economy where product/service providers are competing against each other to make their prod-uct/service as much attractive as possible. In a world where consumers are trained and equipped enough to access adequate information about a product, it led to industries where this competition is extended so that businesses are trying to provide more and more information to the users. Newer technologies are complementing this event by mak-ing it easy for both parties to access information and proper communication. One of the recent technologies which is allowing the user to access further information than existing one’s is Augmented reality (AR). (Seer & Avornicului 2015, 98.)
Augmented reality (AR) is the implementation of virtual objects on top of the real world through digital lenses. It allows user to implement virtually developed ideas in the real world. AR provides functionable links for the user that can be accessed directly and auto-matically between the physical world and electronic information. The potential for this technology is immense which is being explored and implemented by architects, designers, and researchers to enable an advanced digital lifestyle for users where high information flow happens between user and system. (Dieter & Tobias 2016, 2.)
The use of augmented reality in various industries has been increasing in recent years due to its huge acceptance from the users and a technological platform which already is established for such technology. It has emerged as a rapidly developing technology with huge potential for the retailing with the prospect of enhance user experience and selling environment. Both the buyer and seller will get their own share of benefit from this tech-nology as it will create a wider platform of business and transaction. However, there is yet to be enough academic research or practical implementation which is holding the oppor-tunity this technology holds. (Francesca, Gary & Lee 2018, 119.)
In retail business AR has been gaining popularity due to its very nature of allowing users to access additional information from its ancestor technologies. Industry giants like IKEA, Amazon, Nike etc. has already adopted this technology successfully which is becoming a path for others to follow in adopting this technology in their retail business (McKinnon May 2020). Just having a smartphone now enables customers to access information about the dimension, colour, fitting and a sense of closeness in terms of getting acquainted with a product which allowed users to choose the product they like the most. However, this ad-aptation is still very limited to a small sector of industries, while the observed prospect of
AR in other industries such as restaurant or online food delivery is encouraging to make further study in this topic.
Restaurant business has seen a dramatic change in sales channels after Covid-19. Cus-tomers are preferring nowadays to order food home rather than physically visiting a res-taurant. According to Statista, Mckinsey & Morgan Stanley, In US the sales from food de-livery has increased from $16.8 billion to $26.5 billion during the period 2018-2020 (Curry September 2021). With the growth of sales there has also been many service providers who emerged as third-party service provider to deliver food from restaurants to the con-sumers. The success and competition of this service design indicates it will be a continu-ous sales medium for this industry where investors can invest more to improve the facili-ties and information accessibility. On the other hand, customers who are currently visiting the restaurant has been preferring to order from mediums which has fewer contact with other individuals.
By its nature, AR in restaurant industry can provide a superior communication channel be-tween the restaurant owner and consumer than existing ones. Consumers will be able to access information that are not available in current technology about the product and ser-vice. This will then improve the trust and willingness for the users to use online ordering as they can be assured beforehand about the product they are planning to order. So, a user-friendly mobile application which augments the food beforehand is bound to improve the user experience in food ordering. Hence, an in-depth study about a 3D menu design for the online ordering platform to explore the opportunities and to demonstrate scope for businesses is quite interesting and encouraging to take. (Timothy 2018, 134.)
Shneiderman, Plaisant, Cohen, Jacobs & Elmqvist (2018, 131-137) suggest that to design a user interface requires knowledge about multiple designing tools and methodologies.
Terms such as User centred design (UCD), User research, User experience improvement are quite dominant in designing any interface where user interact with a system. While knowledge about requirement analysis, design environment and design tools are also mandatory to design any prototype that can demonstrate the scope and opportunity of that product.
Through this research, the goal is to understand the status, obstacles, and opportunities in the current ordering mediums in restaurant by evaluating user experience & preferences
from available technologies. While the scope of an AR based 3D menu design will be ana-lysed by designing and testing formulas. This document will be a foundation for future re-search about AR in restaurant industry and for learners in use of academic purposes.
2 Research questions and research methods
Researching any matter requires the researcher to fulfil some pre-requisites which helps to formulate the path and specific goals for the research, which will then be used as the measuring scale to measure the outcome of the research. For this research, some re-search questions will help to evaluate the outcome of the thesis as it will provide some specific goals to achieve within specified boundaries. While some pre-defined method will help to formulate the path through which the goals are expected to be achieved.
The primary goals of this thesis are to evaluate the user experience with current restau-rant menu that are available to use and based on the result design a 3D menu with aug-mented reality technology which targets to enhance the experience of the user by provid-ing superior information transaction. And finally evaluate the new design and justify the need for improvement of restaurant menu systems.
2.1 Research questions
The questions that this thesis is aiming to answer are listed below:
• What is the user engagement levels and user experiences with current ordering channels in restaurant industry?
• What are the challenges, gaps, and opportunities for restaurant industry in ordering systems design?
• What is a good AR concept for restaurant menu design?
These are the primary questions that this thesis will be structured upon and will try to an-swer. Through answering these questions scopes, challenges, and preferences for ser-vice design of ordering channels will be realized and by utilizing the user engagement and user experience a better understanding of opportunities will be made which will then be used to design an AR based ordering system to provide an improved user experience for this industry.
2.2 Research methods
Research method provides a path for researchers to follow in the search of research goals and gives guidelines which helps to do step by step research and achieve the desired out-come.
To achieve the goals of this research there are multiple methods that will be followed. Ini-tially a combination of qualitative and quantitative research about current industry status
will be made to find out the status of customer engagement and the experiences with cur-rent ordering systems of restaurants. The goal is to get data about available ordering sys-tems and user engagement using those channels. By gathering a large amount of data about the engagement of users with different ordering systems and the issues with them, a proper quantitative analysis can be made about the user preferences in terms of differ-ent ordering channels and number of issues that has been experienced.
While a qualitative method using interviews of a group of customers can be a good source of user experience evaluation. By formulating a questionnaire which is related to the re-search will provide substantial amount of information both in terms of understanding the status and gaps in user experience and the basis on which the improved design can be developed to enhance the experience of the users.
After the initial research about the current industry status and user experience with the restaurant menu, the research is expected to gather enough information about the user obstacles, gaps, expectations, and preferences in using a restaurant menu. This
knowledge will then be utilized to the next step of this research- conceptualizing, design-ing, and evaluating an AR based restaurant menu.
To design or formulate anything it is necessary to understand the concepts of related tools. In the case of this research, it is also important to have a proper understanding about different design tools and design methods. A proper literature review should help the research in finding this knowledge.
Literature review about some related concepts such as user centred design (UCD), inter-action design (ID), User experience (UX), User interface (UI), Augmented reality (AR), mobile augmented reality (MAR) etc. will be reviewed and used to design a restaurant menu based on AR to provide an enhanced information flow and superior experience.
Finally, observation method will be applied to observe the performance of the developed design utilising usability tests, which will provide the necessary knowledge about the AR design and thus allow to answer the research questions that are formulated earlier.