Challenging Uber Eats: the app that could promote planet-friendly eating habits

Good Girls Gang
Nov 7 · 13 min read

Here goes the thing: when billions of people are starving, we waste around 1/3 of food produced globally. While top scientists are urging us to go plant-based, the global demand for meat is growing. Inside Good Girls Gang, we challenged ourselves with a question: what if food delivery apps started to promote sustainable and planet-friendly eating habits among their audiences? What could be changed then?

What’s the problem? All major scientific bodies around the world say quite the same thing: one of the solutions to mitigate climate change and secure our natural planetary resources is to change the way we eat. Everybody. Everywhere. Now. As Wynes and Nicholas conclude in their scientific paper on the most effective individual lifestyle choices and their impact on global climate, eating plant-based food is the 5th most effective action (after reducing the number of children or not having them at all, or switching to green energy), and it is literally available to every single one of us.

The recipe for a global success in mitigating climate change is quite simple:

  • Your diet should be plant-based (fewer or no animal-based products at all)
  • You should eat just enough
  • You should stop wasting food as you do now.

That’s what planet-friendly eating implies.

According to EAT-Lancet Commission’s Report, this simple, although challenging, eating guideline is the script not only for keeping your body healthy but also for keeping our ecosystem in a healthy condition. Why? Simply because the environmental footprint of plant-based food production (vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts) is dramatically smaller than the one of animal-based products (red meat, poultry, dairy, fish).

For instance, if one person eats a beef hamburger one or two times a week, this personal choice alone costs all of us annually the equivalent of London-Malaga flight’s CO2 emission. And this is solely a calculation for one person. Ok, so, how many people eat a hamburger one or two times a week on this planet? You can do your math, right?


Planet-friendly Uber Eats?

Uber Eats is now available in around 500 cities worldwide. The app definitely has some impact on eating habits among tech-savvy, urban audiences and helps in maintaining the “take-away” culture, often being criticised for adding to the global flood of disposable plastic pollution. We’re happy to see that Uber Eats is addressing the problem, and we can’t wait to see first statistics about their “no disposables” new policy.

https://twitter.com/UberEats/status/1181237749346689024?s=20
https://twitter.com/UberEats/status/1181237749346689024?s=20
Source: Uber Eats Twitter, October 2019

As a part of Uber IPO process, in April 2019 the company revealed that there are 91 million Monthly Active Global Consumers on Uber Eats platform, out of whom “over 15 million received a meal using Uber Eats in the quarter ended December 31, 2018”. Uber Eats definitely has a huge influence on what and how people eat in so called “developed” and “developing” countries. What does one do with such an exposure?

Despite the persistent calling from the scientific world to promote dietary shifts into plant-based eating, Uber Eats, as 1 of Big 4 in mobile food delivery market, does relatively little to promote more planetary-friendly and healthier eating options. This calling is addressed to everybody: governments, businesses and every single one of us. We hope that Uber Eats can do even more for planet Earth.

In 2018, a few local branches of Uber Eats (for example, New Zealand and South Africa) announced in their Uber FoodCast that 2019 will be the year of a vegan diet going mainstream. That is correct: based on Uber Eats search data, more and more Uber Eats users are becoming interested in plant-based alternatives to meat, plant-based superfoods, pickles or edible flowers. After Plant-Powered Perspectives Conference 2019 the general manager of Uber Eats Poland claimed that “in the first half of 2019, the amount of vegetarian and vegan orders rose by 151%”, as compared to a similar period in 2018. Science and data don’t lie. How about turning that into strategic app redesign decisions?

Source: Jakub Pietraszek on Linkedin, October 2019

Does Uber Eats make it easy to find plant-based and planet-friendly food inside the app? Does the way the app is designed mirror the planetary urgency as well as user-driven trends?


Plant-based meals in Uber Eats: what’s wrong in the app?

One of inaccuracies we noticed inside the app is that despite the existing dietary filters (Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten-free, Halal), they seem not to work as they are supposed to.

Source: Uber Eats app, screenshots taken in September 2019

Look at the above screenshots made from Uber Eats (location: USA, somewhere in New Jersey). Let’s recreate our searching path:

  1. We’re on the home view inside Uber Eats with a chosen delivery location
  2. We’re applying “vegan” dietary filter.
  3. The app gives us filtering results. At the very top — the restaurant that neither mentions “vegetarian” or “vegan” options inside their “About” section, nor makes it easy to find any vegan meal inside their menu.

We don’t know how about you, but if we were gradually switching towards plant-based eating (a.k.a., being reducetarian, a.k.a., flexitarian), we might get really frustrated if after choosing “vegan” filter we were given results containing meat, dairy, and cheese, at the very top of their screen inside the “Picked for you” tab.

Does this mean, the app allows to apply the tag “vegan” to the restaurants, which use vegetables, fruits or meat-based protein alternatives (such as tofu, seitan or hummus) inside the dishes that are not 100% vegan? Seriously, Uber Eats?

We will leave you with some open questions regarding the filters at the end of this article.


A few simple ideas that can make a difference

Here come our ideas that can be simply applied inside existing Uber Eats “building blocks”. When thinking about the solutions, we based our brainstorming on two user personas:

Why did we choose these guys for our personas? Why people who are far from calling themselves “vegans”? We made an assumption that a person who is already on a plant-based diet knows restaurants specialising in plant-based meals, and they know how to look for them, even if the filters are not really helpful. Another fact is that most people who already link mass production of animal-based products with the dramatic state of our ecosystem are women. Try to check any group photo from gatherings of animal or environmental activists or browse through the “likes” and followers list of any plant-based meat alternative and you will know what we mean.

So how could Uber Eats promote planet-friendly eating habits among their audiences without redesigning the whole app?

Our ideas for plant-based food promotions based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshot from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

A. PROMOTIONS

Promotion is one of user acquisition strategies that Uber Eats already uses. One of our ideas is to start promoting plant-based meals by running thematic promotions, such as “Meatless Mondays”, for instance every first Monday, each month. Meatless Mondays is an existing international campaign, that even omnivores could have heard about from national, local, or social media. It is a bold attempt to promote plant-based eating among those who usually consume animal-based products, to make them more aware of health and environmental impact of their eating choices. There are already many celebrities involved in promoting Meatless Mondays, so we believe some of them may be happy to help Uber Eats spread the word about the cause.

Our ideas for plant-based food promotions based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

One approach Uber Eats could undertake when providing such promotions, could be to offer smaller prices for plant-based meals, or provide delivery-free promotion if users order a specific number of plant-based meals. Once users tap on the promotion banner on the home view inside the app, they are taken to the list of all restaurants that do provide 100% plant-based options inside their menu.

Obviously, restaurants which are not 100% vegan by default should be involved in such offering as well, to provide an even bigger variety of plant-based choices to the user. All of the restaurants eligible for this promotion could be labeled with a “planet” indicator placed on the main restaurant photo. This indicator should pop up next to the meals that participate in promotion as well — so the users do not have to look for them for too long. This design pattern may also provide better readability and intuitiveness for the users interested in this promotion.

Whatever Uber Eats decides the planet-friendly promotion could involve, we suggest there should always be a link to the Uber Eats Blog, where users could read more and become more aware of the topic. It’s worth mentioning, such promotions could be a part of Uber Eats Corporate Environmental Responsibility strategy, that many environmentally progressive companies have already undertaken, including Fairphone or WeWork.

Our ideas for planet-friendly favourites based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

B. PLANET-FRIENDLY FAVOURITES

Thinking about our personas for this project, we figured out that “favourites” could be a way for them to add their once found “healthy” options to the list of favourite restaurants. Why “traditional” favourites may not be enough, when a person is simply trying to quickly access “that delicious, super healthy and ecological food they ate a month ago”?

Simply, because people like Matthew or Jack are not that kind of users who follow plant-based eating guidelines on a daily basis. Therefore, they will probably have to invest more time to start remembering names of vegan restaurants or plant-based dishes. Also, eating planet-friendly food more often in their case, is a process of forming a new habit, which would probably need some support from the app, before becoming a long-term commitment, and informed dietary choice.

Our ideas for planet-friendly favourites based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

We all know that many digital products are great in developing not-that-healthy habits among their audiences. Why not use the very same digital-based habit-forming patterns, to develop everyday actions that serves both: individual’s and planet’s health?

This is why we thought of introducing a second “favourite” icon (as a variation of planet-friendly indicator described in PROMOTIONS section): planet-friendly favourites. The behaviour of these would be exactly the same as the behaviour of Uber Eats favourites. The only difference is, planet-friendly favourites would be available only from restaurants that mention “vegan” and/or “vegetarian” inside their “About” panel, and do offer such food. However, since dairy and cheese also have a huge environmental footprint, we advise that only restaurants providing vegan options should be taken into account when granting a “planet-friendly favourite” icon.

All of the restaurants claiming to be vegan / vegetarian should, of course, go through the process of a detailed review of their plant-based options. That is a must-have in order to design out ridiculous situations when a restaurant that offers no vegan foods appears in the search results, once “vegan” filter is applied by the user.

Again, we advise that the new favourite icon should be well-described inside an article on Uber Eats Blog, so users know what this new UI element involves and how to use it.

C. SAVING ALMOST-THROWN-AWAY FOOD

Last but not least, our next idea is connected with giving restaurants an option to save food that very often is unnecessarily thrown away at the end of the day. This food could have been donated to people in need, or simply ordered by “food savers” whose population is growing with the introduction of apps such as Too Good To Go.

Our ideas for “Save Food” feature based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

That’s why we came up with an idea called “Save Food” for Uber Eats. The way it would work is pretty simple yet, in our opinion, it might contribute to minimising food waste in many restaurants. Once a restaurant’s staff sees that there’s still a couple of meals left and probably they won’t be sold till the end of the day, they could hit the option “Save Food” in their Uber Eats profile. Users would see this information as a tag on the main list, in the restaurant’s “About” section. Possibly, there could be a filter for restaurants whose “Save Food” option is enabled, so users could search through “Save Food” options only.

Our ideas for “Save Food” feature based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

After getting to the restaurant’s view, users could see a clickable option “Save Food” which would scroll the screen down to food categories placed in a horizontal scroll. “Save Food” would be the first position in the category list, so users could immediately see it. In this category, they would have a dish at a lower price that could be ordered right away.

Our ideas for “Save Food” feature based on the actual design of Uber Eats app. Ideas are presented on screenshots from Uber Eats, taken in September 2019

We realise that this solution is very similar to the application called Too Good To Go, but what would make Uber Eats more user-centered is that surplus dishes from restaurants could be delivered to customers (ideally in paper packaging) anytime they want. In Too Good To Go, users have to pick up their orders at a fixed time, which for many may be impossible or inconvenient.

People are getting more aware of the food waste problem, but let’s be honest, a lot of them want to live as effortlessly as possible. Giving them a choice to be a little bit more planet-friendly while doing what they’ve already been doing for some time now, can make a huge difference. Considering our two personas, we think that they would also like to order a meal at a lower price knowing that they’re saving it from being thrown away. That’s why, we believe, adding this simple feature would surely address the problem of food waste in big cities and help to build an attitude among Uber Eats’ target audience to throw away less food.


Improve your filters, Uber Eats!

Apart from our ideas, we believe that the first thing Uber Eats has to do A-S-A-P is to look inside the filters. We’ve compared the very same filtering/searching path for a few locations (New Jersey, London and Warsaw). Each time the results were more or less inaccurate, but also there are definitely local differences in which vegan meals are described and tagged. Since we have no access to how decisions behind UI & UX design are made, as well as to the logic behind filtering engines inside Uber Eats app, we simply leave these few challenging questions to the app designers and developers:

  • Where users can learn what each dietary filter means and how particular restaurants (or dishes) are matched with this filter (if meat-containing meals can also fall under “vegan” filter, as we could see above)?
  • How does the process of allowing the restaurant to appear inside the filtered results look like? In other words, is there anybody on Uber Eats’ side (for each country branch) involved in making sure that restaurants which claim to have Vegan / Vegetarian / Halal / Gluten-free options really deliver such?
  • Why, as users on a particular diet, we have to read all the meal descriptions carefully — if provided — to find out ourselves which options match my criteria? Why app developers assume that we have more time to make a meal choice, than our meat-eating / omnivore colleagues?
  • Why there is no simple UI indicator / label next to the dishes matching filtering criteria, which could shorten the time and make it easier to people on a particular diet to find what they are looking for?

Legal note

As Good Girls Gang we kindly ask existing global brands and product owners for including environmental and humanitarian challenges of our times inside their business strategies. Our bold ambition is to see environmentally effective features, habit-changing tools, and empowering educational campaigns implemented by these brands into the business model of their products and services. Why? So that more people can be more aware of global challenges of the 21st century, and start act accordingly to these challenges while living their everyday lives. Whenever we use the existing designs, trademarks or copyrighted materials, we do it based on the “fair use” legal policy.

We were not asked by Uber Technologies Inc. to prepare new mockups and think of new marketing ideas for Uber Eats app. We were not hired by, paid by, and have no business relationship with Uber Technologies Inc. We are merely ordinary users of this mobile app, who happen to work inside UX Research & Design industry, and who can see a lot of room for improvement of this and other digital products.

Our activity is simply voluntary and comes from a deep conviction that brands which are operating on a global market should pick up bigger environmental responsibility for their global-wide operations. We hope that international companies will soon invest the same amount of their resources, money, and effort into developing their Corporate Environmental Responsibility programs, as they invest into the development of “innovation”, “competitive products”, or “disruptive technologies”. Moreover, we hope that environmental friendliness will soon become equal to technological disruptiveness.

As Good Girls Gang:

  • we meet after hours with other members of the Gang (an informal research & design-led collective),
  • we turn our free time into time-well spent,
  • we do not seek to gain monetary incentives, popularity or fame for ourselves,
  • we simply hope that our ideas and initiatives will inform strategic decisions of corporate stakeholders working inside impactful, innovative, and leading representatives of digital industry around the world.

We simply want to share our values: let’s design like we care! Let’s design like we do give a damn about Planet Earth & its inhabitants. All of them.


All the above ideas were designed during an ecological hackathon in September 2019 in Warsaw, Poland and later developed and described in this article by Monika (UX researcher, environmental activist, circular economy promoter) and Aleksandra (UI/UX designer and nature lover), members of Good Girls Gang. If you want to join our Gang, and collectively deliver more speculative designs for digital world, join us on Facebook.

Good Girls Gang

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A collective of female digital professionals who use their superpowers for designing pro-ecological & sustainable mobile & web solutions.

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