A Kitchen Management System for the Worcester Regional Food Hub

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Summary

The Worcester Regional Food Hub is moving its culinary incubator to Union Station, where it will have six times the kitchen space as its current location. The goal of this project was to recommend a kitchen management system that will support the needs of the Hub’s staff and entrepreneurs when they relocate. Using input from these stakeholders, we identified functional specifications and evaluated candidate systems. Nexudus fulfilled most of the specifications and was preferred during user testing. The benefits of this new system include time savings for the Director, more responsibility and freedom for entrepreneurs, and the opportunity to create a community.

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Learning Opportunities

In summary, this project leveraged a number of important skills in qualitative and user research, technical writing, and web platforms; utilized supportive tools for remote collaboration and testing; and applied key concepts in requirements analysis, usability, and user-centered design.

- Requirements gathering - Interviewing stakeholders to understand needs for a new system
- Software analysis - Researching, evaluating, and comparing software options as candidate systems
- User testing - Designing and conducting A/B testing with system users to evaluate usability
- Technical writing - Documenting processes, findings, and recommendations in a professional report
- Videoconferencing (Zoom) - For remote interviews and user testing sessions
- Screensharing (Zoom) - To observe users interacting with software during testing
- Excel - For tracking research findings and calculating metrics like task times
- Sentiment analysis - Coding and analyzing qualitative interview data to identify user needs
- Functional specifications - Creating detailed criteria for a new system based on stakeholder needs
- System usability - Evaluating via surveys and task performance to determine ease of use
- A/B testing - Comparing two systems by having users test both in a controlled study
- User-centered design - Focusing on user needs and feedback to drive system selection and design
- Food hubs - Understanding role of these organizations in food systems and communities
- Culinary incubators - Researching best practices for managing these shared kitchen facilities