What is "kosher restaurant design?"
Lately, while managing UX/UI for a variety of digital products , I've been using an analogy for User Experience and Product Design that I'd like to share. It's what I've long referred to as the "impulse to design a kosher restaurant" when crafting your experience. (FYI, I keep kosher, and have worked in kosher restaurants.) Basically, a kosher restaurant—not a fine dining experience; usually fast food or places geared towards families—begins with a focus: it's a chicken joint. Or pizza. Maybe subs? The vision is clear at its outset. But somewhere along the way...the design changes.
At some point, a customer says "I love your pizza, but I also wish you served sushi." Or a sushi place nearby starts doing well and draws customers away. So the kosher pizza place changes its vision to start selling sushi. Then build-your-own salads, or poke bowls. Get the idea? Suddenly, a kosher pizza place (or a sub joint, or chicken shack) that did something very well—had a great vision—added so many new disassociated items that its focus, its vision simply disappeared. And now it's a mess.
In 2008, Joe Boo's—a kosher chicken place in Toronto—had Food Network's Restaurant Makeover come in to renovate the place. What do you think was the Food Network's chef first step? You guessed it: he cut two-thirds of the expanded and evolved menu away; i.e., he took Joe Boo's back to its original vision, see? Suddenly, sushi and poke and tex-mex and everything that was not "good chicken done well" was gone...and Joe Boo's became a chicken place once more.
I'm finding that as I evolve in my career as a product designer and lead UX/UI efforts for a variety of projects and clients, there's always one point throughout the process where a stakeholder urges the design team to overload a site, app or product with as many features as possible... and then keep adding without looking back to reference its original vision and then testing/iterating to ensure any changes or additions are the right changes or additions. It simply becomes functional stew; people love animation? Let's add animation. People are in the market for carousels? Sell 'em a carousel. Yes, sure, animations and carousels can definitely be effective if they serve the vision of the product or screen...but throwing in a carousel in a place it doesn't make sense, or adding a dropdown where radio buttons will do...or putting in three mini-games to increase engagement when your core game mechanic has flaws...that's just adding tex-mex to an Italian restaurant because people will come if we have tex-mex.
"Putting in three mini-games to increase engagement when your core game mechanic has flaws...that's just adding tex-mex to an Italian restaurant because people will come if we have tex-mex."
This style of product design, where business stakeholders or external partners urge design teams to "throw in another cool, amazing feature and see if it sticks" is what I call "kosher restaurant design." The explanation never fails to get a laugh...AND it never fails to prove my point. Establishing a design vision arrived at collaboratively via discovery and definition with the correct, informed, engaged stakeholders is key to ensuring that your digital product is useful and solves a need. Referencing that vision throughout the design process—perhaps evolving and expanding it as you test, learn and iterate with outside focus groups, more stakeholders and actual users—is truly important to you as a product designer.
"Establishing a design vision arrived at collaboratively via discovery and definition with the correct, informed, engaged stakeholders is key to ensuring that your digital product is useful and solves a need."
So, here's my ask, UX and UI designers, product teams, developers and associated business stakeholders: when working in tandem—designing an experience toward a particular vision, to solve a specific need), please resist the urge to design a kosher fast food restaurant. Sure, yes; people love sushi. Hell, I love sushi—it's delicious, affordable and a user experience all it's own.
But just because everyone loves sushi, and you may make some money selling it in your restaurant, does it ultimately make sense for a place whose product vision is to hearken back to traditional, old-school, matzo ball soup and kasha varnishkes delicatessen?