Designing an intuitive system to assist users in swiftly determining their ideal food order
Have you ever been on any food delivery apps available in the market browsing through the long list of menus for the perfect dish to order?
Asking yourself,
What to order?
Does this question haunt you too?
The whole decision-making process may be different for different users. Some know what to have and quickly place an order, some get confused as soon as they browse the menu, while some want to explore different cuisines, and then decide. This takes time and often people drop off while deciding.
This affects the business. Every user is valuable and solving their issues is very important.
The aim of the whole case study was to find simple solutions and help users decide what food to order easily and quickly.
Before conducting the research, we segregated our audience into different age groups to understand their pain points more.
With our target audience we conducted both user interviews and user surveys, with the aim to understand:
- The factors that affect the choice while deciding what to order.
- The ways they come out of their decision-making problem currently.
- The user behavior while ordering food.
Now after all the research we did, figured out few key factors that holds user back while deciding:
1. Lots of options
While browsing through a long list of food options, users often end up liking multiple dishes. This confuses them to decide on a particular dish to order.
2.Taste & Budget
Taste and budget are some of the most important factors that affect the users while deciding what food to order. Finding cuisines that fit the budget range and also match taste is a hassle for users.
3. Know about food
While talking to users about their food choices, a lot of users prefer to have healthy dishes from a hygienic restaurant. So, they want to know details about a dish before ordering it.
4. Asking for suggestions
Users often ask people they know, for their suggestions on what dish should be tried and from where.
Let us now try to understand what happens during the user journey:
User journey tells us about the various emotions and actions that they go through while completing a task.
User Personas:
Collecting all these insights we have 3 clear personas based on three categories:
After talking to the users, we found that most people use zomato to order food. So we choose to work on Zomato.
Also, the research helped me a lot to understand the need of the stakeholders.
Our primary stakeholders are:
- Zomato.
- Consumers.
- Restaurants.
After a long brainstorming session on solving the needs of the stakeholders, we came up with a long list of ideas.
We know the different users and we know our goals. After prioritizing the needs, we choose to divide the goals into three categories:
Before moving to high-fidelity prototypes, we wireframed a lot of ideas and came up with our final prototypes.
In personalization, a lot of new improvements have been done to help users enjoy a personalized experience while ordering food.
- Home Page: We redesigned the home page to display all the favorite dishes of users to help them decide what to order on the go without much thinking. This will reduce unnecessary scrolling and save time.
- Explore Section: We designed a new section to display personalized dishes according to user preferences. This will help them to find new and unexplored dishes that will satisfy their palate. All the users especially the explorers can find new exciting dishes here according to their taste.
We first choose to show explore section on the home and a separate section for favorite cuisines. After testing it with our users, we got suggestions to showcase the favorite dishes on the home page. This will help them to decide what to order on the go without thinking of switching to another tab.
3. Budget Filter: As budget plays an important role, we added a filter option for choosing food according to users' budget range. This will restrict the budget foodies from exploring cuisines that don’t fit their budget range.
Surprise Box:
The Surprise Box section is a new feature that will help users to find new and unexplored dishes in a gamified way when they don’t want to scroll through the menu. It will display dishes matching users' taste preferences. There will be a set of three dishes to choose from. They can change the dishes also. If not satisfied with our picks after multiple shuffles, they can inform us and we will improve to deliver more personalized picks for users.
From the research we came to know that users can’t trust a dish to order, they never tried before. They often ask themselves:
Will I like this dish or not? Can’t trust new dishes that I never tried?
This holds them back from exploring new dishes & new restaurants.
To build trust, we came up with the following solutions:
- Taste Meter: We introduced a taste meter in the dish card which will help users to know whether a dish will match their taste preference or not. This will be very helpful for every section of our users to trust a dish that will match their taste.
We have undergone a lot of usability testing with our users to finally decide the best representation of the taste meter icon.
2.Details: We designed a whole new page to showcase the review of users, ratings, major ingredients used, and an image of the dish.
Other details like calorie intake of a dish, the time it will take to get delivered, how many persons it will serve are also displayed.
All these details will help the health freak foodies to have clarity of information about a particular dish and order with no doubt in mind.
4. Restaurant Rating: User satisfaction percentage on restaurants packaging(Hygiene), Portion size, and taste are portrayed to help all types of users be more confident while choosing a restaurant.
A dish may have a high taste match but a low rating, this will help them to be more confident while deciding. It will help users to understand that this type of dish may match their taste. So they can search for the same with good ratings.
All these design improvements will help users to trust a dish/restaurant while ordering without hesitation.
While discussing with different users, an interesting fact came out about asking others for suggestions on their food choices.
In order to connect users to their close ones on food choices, we thought to introduce a social section, where users can know about others' recent interactions with food through zomato.
If there is a new restaurant or new dishes available in the locality then users will be updated in this section. This will help restaurants reach more customers.
This will help users to remain updated about other’s food choices they might want to know. Also, they can add any dish to the cart from here if they like it without much hassle.
Measuring the impact
We tried to solve the problems with a user’s first approach. While solving for the users, we solved all the other stakeholders’ needs too.
If users easily and quickly decide what to order, they might complete their action of ordering food which will reduce user drop off. This will increase the business also.
We included many new improvements to help restaurants reach more users. If users have clarity of information about a restaurant and their food, they will add dishes to their favorite list. This will be updated to their closed ones through zomato social which will instigate users to order that dish and help restaurants gain more customers.
All these design improvements will help ZOMATO connect to more users and grow its business.
That’s a WRAP
Looking forward to your suggestions and the areas of improvement.
You can connect to me on LinkedIn.
#OPENTOWORK
