How Swiggy could make group food ordering easier
Tanvi and Swaroop invite a few of their friends over for a house party. A dozen beer tins and a game of Catan later, the hunger game begins!
“Guys, I am ordering food, do y’all want anything?”
“Yes, can we order from The Bombay Curry? I want two butter rotis and chicken pepper gravy. Thanks!”
“That place sucks. Let’s order from Macrofy. Their paneer tikka is cray.”
“I just want to have an underbaked cake with some ice cream. Can you order that for me, please? I’ll GooglePay the amount to you.”
We’ve all been here. And there’s always one person who volunteers to do all the hard work of ordering food for the group in a party. God bless them!
In Tanvi and Swaroop’s party, it is Harish who volunteers to order food for everyone in the room. Harish decides a restaurant and asks if everyone’s okay with it. 10 minutes of restaurant and cuisine discussions later, the loudest person in the group picks the place to order from. And everybody around gives in.
Since Tanvi and Swaroop live in a gated community with more than 10 blocks in their apartment, Harish has to manually key in the correct block, gate, and the closest landmark. Harish makes his selection and passes around his phone for the others to order. After a few ten minutes of restaurant discussions, Harish grabs the phone back and places the order for the entire group.
These are the problems that occur not only in Tanvi’s houseparty but are also common across scenarios that involve ordering food for a group of people:
- Manual addition of Tanvi’s address.
- Harish can’t order from multiple restaurants.
- Time-consuming & cumbersome.
- Splitting of the bill as per each person’s share.
The Opportunity
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GPS isn’t necessarily accurate if you’re inside a large apartment/office complex. “What’s the closest accurate mapped google places location?”
Further, there are blocks and tower names you need to know of. And then, door and flat numbers.
There needs to be an option for Tanvi to share her address seamlessly with Harish to reduce the hassle of manual mapping.
#1 — Picking up a saved address from a friend
Think of this like sharing wifi passwords with other people on iOS 12.
Let’s call this ‘Swiggy Share’. Harish requests Tanvi to share her address. Tanvi receives Harish’s request and she can choose to accept or reject his request. The flow of actions is explained in the screens below.
There are multiple use cases in which more than one person can send ‘Swiggy Share’ requests. On such circumstances this design allows the user to handle multiple requests and also allows the user to assign the right address to share with the right request.
After Tanvi selects the right address to share with Harish, the address shared is saved in Harish’s ‘Saved Addresses’ and the sharing is complete!
#2 — Cart Collaboration
Remember Harish trying to cumulate orders from everyone? You’ve probably been there too. The whole group is patiently waiting for everyone to make their choices and decide on a common cuisine/restaurant. This can be a lot simpler if the choices made by Harish’s friends would be added to Harish’s cart in real-time.
Think of this like collaborating on G Suite. Except, this could be via bluetooth.
Harish can now add his friends around to his cart via Bluetooth. All that his friends have to do is acknowledge his request and once it’s accepted, everybody has a synchronized cart :)
This reduces the time taken to make orders for a group and also allows Harish to set a timer for his friends to add items to his cart. Payments could also be split accordingly if there is a saved payment method that could be billed without 2FA (CVV/OTP authentication)
While group carts could also be synchronized over the internet, I think Bluetooth makes it easier spite potential on-off friction that could arise. Summarising, I would love to see food apps making group ordering and collaboration better. And as a regular user of Swiggy, I’d be elated if Swiggy does their magic with making this easier.
If you have an interesting group food order story or a notable method/hack that your friends used to make this process easier, do drop a comment or hit me up — would love to know about it.
🙌🏼 With inputs from Krishna Murari (@krishna06)
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Disclaimer: I am not associated with Swiggy and these are just my thoughts on how all food delivery apps could make collaborative food ordering easier.
