Angela’s desk was filled with paperwork. In her small office at the back of her restaurant, she was filled with fear. Days prior, she had been forced to close doors because of the shelter-in-place restrictions put in place on March 23rd across Massachusetts. While she understood the shutdown, the uncertainty of not knowing when she could open again was hurting her financially. The novel coronavirus pandemic was uniquely frightening, but this wasn’t the first time she felt uncertainty.
When first opening her restaurant, Angela felt that the Boston city government didn’t help her with a number of questions she had: What forms should she fill? How long would the process take? What departments did she need to go to?
Both then and now, Angela couldn’t hire people or buy the necessary food products. She needs time to go through resumes and secure her supply. With a little more certainty, she could plan ahead and be ready for opening day and minimize her losses. While nobody knew yet how or when the lockdown would end, the City of Boston can make it easier for her and other restaurant owners to navigate the complicated initial approval and permitting process.
Over the course of this past semester, our team of five graduate students, in Harvard’s Tech and Innovation in Government field class, spoke to many restaurant owners to understand the challenges they face as they attempt to open a new venue. We brainstormed a number of different solutions and picked a few to test them with restaurant owners. Working alongside employees at the City of Boston’s Inspectional Service Department (ISD), we hope these ideas can be put into practice.
Entrepreneurs like Angela face incredibly tough competition, long hours, and high expectations from Boston residents. Our goal was to help lighten the load they already carry.
Prototype Testing & Iterating
Because our early interviews revealed that restaurant owners are frustrated with fragmented information across the web and lacked the ability to understand where they were in the process, our first instinct was to build an online portal where owners could upload their documentation once and receive feedback digitally.
However, as we began to think of implementation, we realized that an online portal takes time to build. And it turns out the City of Boston already has a similar portal in place with additional features under development.
Could there be a solution that provides value that doesn’t require much technology?
After another round of talking with owners, we realized that there were easier ways to reduce the uncertainty throughout the process by: (1) providing a feedback mechanism between them and the City of Boston, and (2) making reliable, easy to find information about the restaurant opening process readily available.
However, we wanted to ensure that these ideas would actually help restaurant owners. Our process was:
First, we drew out the solutions we envisioned on paper.
Second, we refined the drawing into a low-fidelity prototype using a tool called Balsamiq.
Then, we ran our first round of testing—we gathered insights into how the owners would use these solutions and what features would make it even better.
Next, we used the feedback to produce a second usable prototype using a free online survey creator and an online document sharing website.
Finally, we ran our second round of testing and used that feedback to our near-final product. We went through this process several times to arrive at a point that provided value for restaurant owners, while also being feasible for ISD to maintain and incorporate.
Figure 1: Paper, balsamiq, survey tool feedback survey progression
Our Two Ideas to Support Owners
The goal of these two ideas is for them to be sustainable, meaning they can be improved on and useful in the long-term. The deliverables should be easy to integrate into the City’s existing processes and therefore usable by its different departments.
Restaurant Opening Guide
During our testing sessions and interviews, we unequivocally heard the desire to have a guide that contained each step of the restaurant opening process and the resources available. Our user guide is a step-by-step online document with links to corresponding documents or websites. It includes a visual representation of those same steps as well as an inspection checklist. The document allows for easy updates by ISD and other departments.
Figure 2: Step by Step Guide
Feedback Survey & How-To Guide
During our interviews and testing sessions, restaurant owners told us they wanted to give feedback to ISD and the City of Boston about their experience. They described negative experiences—such as troubles with inspectors or conflicting information sources—that they felt would hinder other business owners, and wanted the City to fix the issue.
Our feedback survey: (1) allows the city to receive constant feedback from restaurant owners in a structured manner (Figure 3), and (2) provides ISD a guide on how to ensure anonymity and how to use the data to improve internal processes.
Figure 3: Final Feedback Survey
Figure 4 How to-Guide and Data Usage Instructions
Thank you
As our project comes to an end, we reflect on Angela’s experience and the impact that our small time on this problem could have on business owners like herself. We are especially thankful to all the restaurant owners and the ISD team who gave us so much of their time. Our proposed solutions—a restaurant owner guide and a feedback survey— are based on their excellent feedback and suggestions.
While we wish that we could have worked on this project for another semester, we’re confident that our ideas can be taken forward by the City to help Boston’s restaurant community. We hope that our work this semester has provided the City of Boston further insight into problems faced by restaurant owners and that, post-pandemic, they have new tools to help entrepreneurs open restaurants to once again create a thriving food and culture scene here in Boston.
- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi