Case Study: Designing a group food delivery app- S.L.U.R.P

Hey all, Today we’ll explore the design of S.L.U.R.P, a food ordering app that provides a group food ordering feature.

Problem Statement

In today’s fast-paced world, coordinating group food orders can be a chaotic and time-consuming process. People often face challenges when trying to organize and enjoy a shared meal together. Issues such as miscommunication, difficulty splitting the bill, and lack of transparency in the ordering can lead to frustration, confusion, and an overall subpar dining experience.

There is a pressing need for a comprehensive group food delivery app that simplifies coordination, promotes seamless communication, and ensures a delightful and stress-free experience for all participants.

Since I had limited time to solve this problem, I decided to plan out a process to help me reach an optimal solution for this feature.

Not at all a linear process!

What Currently happens?

Let’s imagine you and your friends decided to meet after a long time.

Research:

What would be better than directly asking people about their pain points?
So I interviewed some people, and here are my findings:

Problems they faced

Major Problems with the current flow:

• Unorganized
• Lack of transparency can lead to excess food waste
• Splitting bills can be a headache
• Introverts might be left unheard
• Tracking orders becomes messy (whose order is at the door?)
• Nutritional Value details should be added

Brainstorming for possible solutions:

I started out from thinking of adding a shared cart feature. This feature looked limited to me as I thought of adding a splitting bill feature, paying for others, giving a voting option, etc.

So after lots of thoughts, I came to the conclusion that adding a group feature would simplify it.

Problems with only adding a multiple restaurant cart feature:

• It’s not economical, firstly as if the same delivery agent picks up the orders from different locations, it will spoil the food, and if we assign different delivery agents to ensure the quality of food delivered, the cost will increase exponentially, and receiving multiple deliveries will affect the user’s experience.

Let’s imagine a scenario: You are attending a friend’s gathering, and everyone has placed their food orders. All the orders have arrived except yours, which is still showing a waiting time of 20 minutes. However, you don’t want to cause inconvenience to others by making them wait for your order to arrive. It won’t be a good experience, right?

Introducing S.L.U.R.P

S.L.U.R.P, a food delivering app which offers unique features such as Groups, Voting option, Mutiple restaurant cart etc to elevate your food ordering experience. Voting adds an element of fun and engagement.

Roles in S.L.U.R.P

1. Host: The person who started sharing the Invite link/code.
2. Participants: People who get added using the Invite link/code

Hosts point of view

1. When the host clicks on create new group, they need to name and add people to the group( similar to Whatsapp).
2. They can send the invitation code( like among us ) or scan QR code to join the group.
3. After that, everyone in the group can choose whether they want to vote for a restaurant/dish or go with shared cart.
4. They will be responsible for checking out to make the easier.

Participants point of view

1. They will be able to vote, select, and add dishes of their choice( for now).

Splitting Feature:

In a gathering, people have different payment preferences. Some prefer to clear their split immediately, while others are fine with settling it later. To keep the party mood going, you may choose to pay for the expenses upfront, allowing everyone to enjoy without worrying about individual payments at that moment.

So, i decided to add, these options to enhance the experience:

If a host chooses to split the bill later, they can rest assured knowing that the transaction will be securely saved within the group. Once everyone has finished enjoying the meal, the host can conveniently select their preferred method of splitting the bill, and all participants will be promptly notified about their respective dues. This ensures a hassle-free and transparent process, allowing everyone to settle their payments without any concerns.

Before the order is placed

Things needed to be solved are:

1. Bringing people together at one place
   People can join the group in three ways:

• Through Invite code
• Through scanning the QR code
• They can also be added manually by the host.

Considering that sometimes , you don’t have a WhatsApp group or everyone's contact number, using an invite code made sense to me rather than an invite link.

2. Voting option for budget friendly party

Imagine it’s month's end, you are on a tight budget so you can’t just order from different places as it increases the cost greatly. So you decide to vote for a restaurant, but manually voting is messy. Here comes our voting feature to help you out.

3. Transparency about what is being ordered

Sometimes we order excess food because we don’t know what the other person is ordering, to solve this our transparent cart feature come to your rescue.

Thought of keeping the actions only for the host for now as lot of issues arised when anyone can choose the actions, like what if multiple users clicked CTA at once and many more.

While placing the order

You can select which type of split you want and also pay for others as we understand that sometimes the other person may face issues such as server down etc.

I thought of confirming the order only when all the payment is done because, the amount to be paid is inclusive of taxes and charges so it would not be a good choice to confirm partial order.

After placing the order

Everyone in the group will be able to track the order. If the participants ordered from multiple places, they will be able to see upcoming order to maintain clarity.

How can we make multiple restaurants cart economically viable?

To ensure hot and economically viable food delivery, we can use a machine learning model that sorts restaurants based on cooking time and distance. This helps prioritize options that deliver food quickly and are cost-effective, resulting in a hot and affordable meal for the user.

How will I measure the success of my solution?

• Adoption Rate: Track the percentage of users who actively utilize the group ordering feature.
• Number of Group Orders: Monitor the frequency of group orders placed through your app.
• Order Value: Measure the average order value for group orders compared to individual orders. If group orders result in higher order values, it demonstrates the success of the feature in encouraging larger and more comprehensive orders.
• Repeat Usage: Track how often users engage in group ordering over time.

Some scenarios to consider in the future

• Allowing anyone in the group to do the actions like pay, start voting etc
• Should we provide a pay with cash option?
• Individual feedback
• Chat feature to discuss if ordering in advance
• Cancelling a part of group order option after the payment

Can’t view the screens clearly? Don’t worry, Click here.

Thanks for reading❤️.
Do you have any thoughts about the process and the thinking presented?

Let me know in the comment section.