Food Box App

We in our daily life deal with products that are designed in such a way to ease our routine life. From giant-scale robots to a mere pencil holder, all give our life a relaxing push. But, all these products are designed to affect different sections of the users or say a different type of users. Thus, the research and ideas behind those products are entirely different. They are designed just the way to accomplish their usability. One such product was “Food Box App,” which I worked on during my summer vacations.

Not all products solve a wide variety of problems. Some of them are designed to solve a fundamental problem that can ease our day to day life. Food Box was such a product which taught me all of these about product designing. So I am going to describe my journey with the app.

Search for the problem:

During my summer internship with Rentomojo, design & tech team of the company were always facing the problem of not having a proper lunch during the working days. All were either ordering food online or not having lunch at all. The solution for this came out to order food from a private mess which made food daily with their menu and delivered the boxes to us during a fixed time in the afternoon. The payable amount for each box was fixed. One person from the team paid the bill and after they all settle the money among themselves. The solution looked good, and most of the members of the team now relied on this mode of lunch only.

The problem started right after the first week. Apart from many small issues, there were majorly two problems.

1. There was all-time confusion about who has ordered the food and how many boxes were there in total. Most of the orders were counted correctly, but there were instances of mismanagement, due to which requests for the boxes were incorrect. All of this lead either to no lunch for some people or compromise for the others.
2. After all proper measures for splitting the bills, there was no solid count of how much share one person is contributing to paying the bills. This lead to problems for the person paying the overall bill to the vendor.

This problem was worth solving and would require a more simplistic approach in the solution.

Analyzing the situation:

Before proposing a solution, the first thing was to investigate the case and the users. What type of solution would be best suited for the problem? I went with a fundamental approach to study user with personas. Listed here are two types of users.

Evaluating the behavior and routines of the people, the key points that came out were:

1. The solution should contain easy and time-saving elements, as everyone was working and busy with their work.
2. There should be proper data of people ordering the box with the number of boxes ordered as well.
3. No one must be left out in the process of ordering the food.

All these points were kept in mind and search for the best-suited solution started.

Proposing the Solution:

Many ideas rolled in the mind, and finally, the basic idea of having a small app acted as the best-suited solution. It would integrate the time-saving elements, data collection, and proper process of taking the orders to the vendor.

To work with such a simple app having all features up front to limit the time consumption was a challenging task for me. For this, I tried using the simple card-based UI with some cool interactions to make the app more interactive and easy to use.

Basic Wireframes:

Basic Sketched Wireframes of different screens

Final UI:

Final Iterated version of UI

Interactions:

Dribbble Shots

Answers to the Questions asked by people:

Many people, especially some of my design mentors, asked me many questions about the functionality of the app. Many of you would also have some doubts and questions. I want to answer some of the main questions asked very frequently.

1. The app indicates “+1 for friend” and doesn’t show or asks about the name of the friend. It is because the app is meant for those few 20–25 members and any other person who proposes to try the food should not be involved. For Example, if three new people came and they want to eat lunch, the host can order four boxes, and he don’t have to write each persons name because they will not be included in the process and the product does not require a name to function. Adding such a feature is just an extra point with no additional benefit and will only make the process complex. Hence there is no use for mentioning the name as app is to maintain smoothness in order taking and money management. Person ordering two boxes must pay for both boxes.
2. Food Box is meant to be used for lunch boxes only. Currently, this app solves the primary purpose only, so the features are limited. You can incorporate the elements once people are used to with the app and their demand increase.
3. The amount to be paid is fixed by the vendor only, and there is no variation in type of boxes. Everyone gets the same contents in the box (which to be very honest was excellent in quality & taste and was worth the money). So every time a person pays the money, it is the fixed amount decided by the vendor.

Summarizing

In the whole duration of 2 weeks, while working on this project, I learned many small things that can be used in many places. Building even a small scale production can be fascinating work to do. As a product designer, we must look around to see different problems which can be solved using various design approaches. And seeing such things around myself motivates me to learn more ways to approach to a solution.