OrderNova provides a cloud-based solution that unifies ecommerce, in-store, and wholesale bakery order management with detailed, on-demand reporting to help bakeries complete and analyze their daily operations.
In 2018 founders of OrderNova reached out to Lunar to take over the MVP development for a third-party that built a web app in Ruby on Rails and Angular. Our developers fixed bugs, improved existing code and revamped some features. Unfortunately, due to externalities the platform has not gone to market at the time.
In 2020, Lunar reached out to OrderNova and offered assistance in bringing the platform live. We’ve assembled a team of designers and developers with a strong product mindset and started a 2 year journey, during which we launched the product and constantly gathered user feedback, and experimented with different marketing strategies and new features.
Initial goal was to get the OrderNova app to a place where it would be ready to face first customers. Our team went through a thorough research to understand the business domain and potential customers. This involved user interviews, user testing, competitors analysis, UX audit and more. The result was a reshaped business strategy to reach our first customers with the MVP.
When we first started to work with OrderNova, one of the blockers for launch was poor app performance. Once a bakery would input their whole product offer, that could consist of dozens or even hundreds of baked goods, it was taking minutes to load. Usability of multiple features was compromised by lack of pagination and inefficient loading. Before onboarding first beta testers we addressed crucial UX issues that surfaced during research and drastically improved app performance. First bakeries started to use our app and we learned from their experiences in our product.
We were proactively researching and gaining insights into bakeries' needs. We talked with OrderNova users and used diary studies* to make data-driven decisions about new features, improvements and marketing activities.*
*Diary studies - we encouraged our users to share daily summaries of their experience in the app, issues they encountered and problems they had to solve.
One of the pain points that surfaced during user research was reporting. Bakery workers would input dozens of future orders for cakes and customisable pastries daily. Bakers then need to plan the production to fulfill all the orders on time.
Based on bakeries input, we’ve identified a few most important filters and kinds of reports that would allow bakers to be efficient and avoid mistakes or missed orders. We tested prototypes to verify if they would solve customer problems. Bakers were genuinely excited to be able to use those reports in their daily work.
Some bakers were used to modifying custom spreadsheets or generating complex reporting. Those features weren’t high on our priority list, so we looked for a simple workaround that would still satisfy those more demanding users. To address more specific use cases we added an option to download a CSV format.
Planning bakery’s production within seconds with refined reporting became a strong value proposition of the OrderNova platform.
During work on OrderNova we faced a challenge of working with legacy code. We kept in mind that our goal is a successful project not perfect code. Lunar Logic developers have experience in working with a challenging codebase. We treated it as a project constraint that we had to understand and identify the problems. We created a plan of gradually improving the codebase while maintaining a working product.
Once the first bakeries went through the trial period with OrderNova, the topic of invoicing became a priority. The legacy pricing and invoicing system had bugs and allowed for very little flexibility. Instead of spending time on rewriting it, we decided we could initially take care of invoicing manually. This enabled dynamic experiments and prompted insightful conversations with our customers. Instead of relying on code, we could stay in close contact with bakeries that were paying for OrderNova and create stronger connections with first users of the product.
OrderNova founders were talking with each customer finishing their trial. We got valuable feedback on our pricing and user satisfaction. Once we felt confident we had a solid first-iteration idea for pricing, we started to code it.
Our developer enabled the team to run product experiments, spike simple solutions to customer problems and slowly built a momentum towards cleaner, reliable codebase. In this project, coding was quite often “the last resort”. Our ambition was to stay agile, test, experiment and learn to bring OrderNova to revenue fast.
Holiday season is very busy for bakeries. It wouldn’t be the best time for them to introduce a new system into their complex work environment. Important part of our approach was to adjust to those circumstances. We were working on seasonal campaigns, reaching out to bakeries in summer and early autumn, so in time for the busy season they would have already been confident in using OrderNova and could benefit from its full potential.
Our team actively assisted project founders in providing customer support. Lunar Logic developer would go through reported issues and help customers directly, by answering questions, making code tweaks and prioritizing future development.
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