Ordering a food delivery either during the day or when getting off work is probably one of the most common ways for people to figure out where and what to eat in 2019. Nowadays, we are all busy working on different projects — of school, work, or other daily schedules. According to the user interviews I did focusing on food delivery issues, most full-time and part-time students usually place a food delivery order 2–3 times a week.
The Challenge
According to the user interviews, when actually using the food delivery apps, such as Uber Eats, Eat24, etc., most users may encounter the following challenges:
· Description of each dish do not always include image.
· For the dishes having images on the app, their images do not always match what they really look like (size, appearance, etc.).
· Most users would not spend much time exploring new features, items while ordering a delivery. They tend to go for what they ordered before. (Look into their order history)
· The driver locating map and system could sometimes provide wrong messages.
· Most drivers merely text the users when they arrive.
· Users care about discount information, delivery time & fees.
Defining the Key Pain Points
Since I’m one of the Y generation folks currently being a graduate student like many food delivery app users do, I’m pretty much glued to the food delivery apps during the week, especially the one when I have so much work and projects from school and internship. To better identify what kinds of depressing problems that users encounter and what they really care about when using a food delivery app, I worked on a series of competitive teardown and flowcharts, aiming to firstly knowing how the current food delivery apps work, how the whole user journeys are, and so generating the very start of my unique design ideas for my food delivery app Dan’s Love.
After analyzing how users interact in the competitive and comparative apps, which, in these cases, are Uber Eats serving competitive app and YELP serving as the comparative one, I made these two flowcharts to better clarify different options and paths users might choose when achieving their goals. Also, the primary user group for these apps is identified as people who have the following features:
· Live alone or commonly eat by themselves even living with others;
· Busy with work or study, etc., so do not have enough time for grocery shopping and cooking.
Their goals are quite simple — one thing is to save time and energy; another thing is to try different dishes that they can hardly cook at home.
At the competitive teardown, I mainly focused on identifying the main screens and functions for each app, figuring out what elements work or don’t work. Doing things like this is quite beneficial. So, what are the common elements for these food delivery app?
· Exploration section, restaurant search, food search, restaurant categories, restaurant images, dish images, dishes’ ingredient description, app layout, restaurant reviews, food reviews, delivery fees, delivery time, discount info.
What are the priorities of those elements?
· App layout > restaurant images > restaurant categories > restaurant search > exploration section > restaurant review > dish image > dishes’ ingredient description > food reviews > food search > discount info > delivery time > delivery fees.
What are the 3–4 major themes that you might consider emulating?
· An easy-to-understand and clear-to-action layout.
· Images for all the dishes available.
· Section of what food/restaurants other users recommend.
· A new “Sort” option for putting restaurants with same delivery fees into same categories.
So, I think there are two key pain points to solve during the latter design process:
1. How to make the whole app become more efficient and effective for users to choose restaurants and dishes.
2. How to identify and decrease the unnecessarily confusing elements, features, and functions as many as possible.
Execution: Design
Demonstrating the solution for all these issues will definitely require an animated prototype, but before jumping to the prototyping stage I always start with designing in Sketch.
During the sketching process, my goal was to create different probable versions of each main screen of the app, also including all the necessary elements and functions I considered to be significant. I didn’t want to create a thoroughly different sense of the app, in another word, my new app might have a lot of “old” elements and use the same task journey — homepage, restaurant list, food page, and payment page. For a new food delivery app, the whole user journey, including the users’ experience and thoughts for it, should easy-to-understand and most importantly, enable them to acknowledge how to use the app easily.
Execution: Prototyping
During the prototyping process, my goal was to utilize short, quick, and playful animations to generate a fast, responsive, and reliable feedback of the overall food delivery ordering process.
Usability Test and Findings
After preliminarily finishing the digital prototyping process, I moved to the next step — making a usability test plan and script to examine my design. Before truly initiating this work, I wrote down the following research questions for the test:
· Whether the actual user experience of Dan’s Love is better than other food delivery apps that currently exist.
· If the current functions in Dan’s Love could meet the users’ needs.
· If there is any part or function of Dan’s Love, which might confuse users.
· Whether the Dan’s Love (with its innovated design and functions) could promote users’ confidence while exploring and using the app.
· Can Dan’s Love (with its internal layout, design, and functions, etc.) improve users’ effectiveness in ordering a food delivery?
· If any, what function(s) is/are still missing?
· How do users get to the restaurant they have mind for, using the search bar or doing a step-by-step process?
According to the usability tests conducted, most of the users consider the main screens and the whole user journey are easy-to-understand and clear-to-action. But, there are parts that need to be improved. The meanings or functions of certain parts/icons inside the app are confusing — users may generate different and unexpected thoughts for a same part/icon. Also, elements, like the chosen food category and “cart and payment”, are not obvious or call-to-action enough, which lead to the fact that users tend to ignore their existence and their experiences get worse.
During the test, I noticed a few things. In a exploring case, users always tend to go for the hero image section first and then try for “what others like” and different food categories sections.
For further revisions I’m going to make for the app, I shall replace some of the confusing elements/icons with a more self-explained one, and add more details for the app. And most importantly, I will figure out more unique points — from functions to design — to increase its competitiveness.
Takeaways
For me, this user-centered design project is exceedingly challenging and motivating to promote both my understanding and awareness for different design problems we might encounter. I believe we should never be satisfied with the existing solutions without questioning them and trying to constantly improve them even if we fail many times during this process.