A Case Study on Foodora: UX Analysis & Redesign
Introduction
A story about hunger, food and delivery…
Since I started my study in Munich, I gradually realized that getting some food to eat is sometimes a challenge here. Especially on holidays, only few stores are open. It’s actually quite annoying when one is hungry but has no idea where he/she can get something to fill the belly. Not to mention when one immerses oneself in games, movies or something important for them. At that moment, foodora seems to be a nice solution.
What is foodora?
foodora GmbH is a Berlin-based online food delivery company which offers meals from over 6,500 selected restaurants in 10 countries worldwide. Customer can set their locations, search and browse the restaurants nearby, and order the food directly on its website or mobile app.
“With foodora you, an adept of gourmet foods, can access the trendiest restaurants wherever you are. Whether you prefer to order Italian, Chinese, Mexican or any other type of cuisine — the dishes you love will be delivered to your home or office in a blink of an eye. Fresh sushi, authentic Italian style pizza, spicy Thai. We’ve made sure that only the tastiest dishes from the best restaurants in town are available for you.”
Why foodora?
The posters in metro stations and bikers on the road firstly triggered my interest in foodora, but I had no idea what it is at that time. I just felt that it might be something cool because people around me talked about “foodora” quite often and I saw it almost everywhere. Something like riders with a big pink bag on the their back, act like a super hero who is going to save the world.
After ordering food on its website few times with my roommate, I finally knew why people like it. The good thing is you can sit on the sofa, browse the fantastic menu, and half hour later the hot food will show up in front of you. Although users have to pay some money for the delivery, I guess the service worth it.
Later on, I started wondering how the app looks like and downloaded the app. After playing it for a while, I had the feeling that there are some space for improvement. For an example, the app sometimes works quite different with my expectation and I don’t really like the interaction design (feedbacks/response when of some buttons). I was not sure whether it’s only “my problem” or whether there might be someone else feeling the same way, so I just checked the Reviews and other’s comments on google play and App Store.
Here’s other’s opinions from google play:
Well, it seems that there is more than one user having problems with using the app for some reasons (1,633 one star out of 5,625). So, the idea came to my mind that maybe doing a UX study on this app would be interesting and valuable for me to learn and practice my skills.
Objectives
- Discover how people use foodora mobile App, mainly focus on user journey from searching to adding desired products to their shopping carts
- Find pain points and ambiguous designs which might confuse users
- Understand why some functions or designs are not intuitive enough for users, or even kind of annoying
- Analyze the pain points, redesign, and provide recommendations for improving user experience
Process
Having a nice plan helps me a lot to do the work step by step to avoid getting in a state of chaos. For this reason, I reviewed other talent’s researches and studies like Usability Test on Product Hunt for iPhone by Eric Lee, A Study on Usability: Coffee Meets Bagel by Patricia Zhang and IDEO’s human-centered design thinking process as references to build one process which can give me a picture about what I’m going to do for this research.
1. Research
Guerrilla Usability Testing:
According to Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users by Jakob Nielsen, 7 users for usability testing can help the researcher to find out around 90% of the main problems of the product. Since I cannot speak German well, I decided to conduct the guerrilla usability testing in Technical University of Munich, Olympiazentrum station, and CDTM, where I can find english speakers, during lunchtime and dinnertime.
In order to figure out how the users use the foodora app, this research applies the concept of “Job To Be Done” (JTBD) framework to prepare 3 main scenarios for the tests (JTBD framework check here). In each scenario, testers are free to do anything to achieve the main task and they are also encouraged to speak out how they feel, what they are thinking about or whatever they like or feel not comfortable with. Giving the tester a clear explanation of the scenario without guiding them or implying them to use specific function is crucial for getting the “clean” feedbacks.
Scenario:
Honestly, building a good scenario (a job to be done task) is indeed tricky and difficult. This is quite “dangerous” since a biased scenario might lead to a result which will make all the further works in vein. Another situations is the scenario might lead the testers to act in the way meeting the hypothesis since the scenario was unconsciously designed to guide them doing that. Actually, I made some of the mistakes mentioned above and wasn’t aware of it at the beginning. Thanks to a good friend of mine, Julian Jeng, who gave me certainly nice feedback and pointed out what I did wrong.
Back to the scenarios I create for this test, I collected some elements for building the scenarios based on my observation, experience and some short interviews with my friends. In my opinion, there are definitely some reasons that people are willing to pay extra money for the delivery food. Here are the main reasons(elements) I summarized:
- Doing something important and don’t want to stop
- Sharing time with others
- In the emotion want to treat themselves well
- Most of stores are closed outside
- Lazy
And then, I mixed the elements above to create 3 scenarios are as following:
- When I am tired of the food I have almost 3 times a week, I want to find something different but not too expensive so I can have a nice dinner after a tiring work.
- When it is time for lunch but I’m immersing myself in something important, I want to get some food delivered to my place so I don’t have to stop what I’m doing now.
- When my friend and I are hungry but no one want to go out for food or cook, we want to get something to eat so we can save some time from preparing dinner.
Tool:
I did all the interviews with UXTesting which can record the users clicks, actions, facial expression changes and helps me to manage the tasks and questions with less efforts. Of course, during the interviews I still took a lot of notes on paper rather than sitting in a daze. Observing how the users work is extremely important, but the recording by the UXTesting allows me to review the interviews again to explore some further insights, if any I wasn’t aware of. Besides, UXTesting provides the amazing functions like emotion analysis, which detects user’s facial changes, can help me to dive deeper to think about what kind of interactions or process annoys the user at some specific moments.
Here’s how the recording looks like:
Raw Result:
After I had completed the usability testing with 7 users, I reviewed my notes and wrote down obstacles they came across and feedbacks on posters.
Affinity Mapping:
To have a clearer picture about what might lead to a negative experience, I used an affinity mapping process to group the feedbacks by their similarity into themes and identified 7 main problems as following:
- Inspiration & Review — Users sometimes have no idea what they want to eat and look around for inspiration or recommendation. Also, some of them want to have reviews or comments of the restaurants they are interested in.
* Inspiration and Review can be two independent categories, I put them together in consideration of that user want to get their job done asap (find and order a good meal). During the tests, some testers “uhm, let me see what others ordered” , “I’d like to see what’s popular here” etc. - Budget & Price — Some of the users try find and to set budget limits, but doesn’t provide this function. The current solution (€ sign) is understandable, but not clear. In addition, bout half of the users report that they want to see “what’s the average price of one main dish”.
- Restaurant Info — Some pictures or information are not clear enough and take the users some time to find out what kind of style the restaurant is and what do they sell.
* Actually, Review can also be part of the Restaurant Info. - Filter & Search Bar Design — Few users cannot find the filter. Part of them don’t use the search bar at all, and some of them are not satisfied with the search results.
- Menu & Food Info — Users want to see food pictures on the menu to have a better understanding about the what they are going to pay money for.
- Cancellation — Too many steps to cancel the order when they change their minds or accidentally add food to the shopping cart while scrolling, and the cancellation button is too small and not easy to click.
- Wrong Click & Unexpected Feedback — Some users accidentally click and add food into cart while scrolling down the menu, and some expect that they will see further information about the dish by clicking it.
Define
Prioritize Needs:
Same with most of other UX researchers usually do, I evaluated the pain points by business value and user value to identify major and minor problems for optimization:
Major Problems:
To maximize the value for both sides, providing a efficient tool for getting inspiration and reducing the concerns is regarded as the main problem for improvement. Under this premise, inspiration, reviews and relevant information is regarded as the major problems for improvement.
- Inspiration & Review
- Menu & Food Info
- Restaurant Info
Minor Problems:
On the other hand, the other 4 pain points are also important for user’s overall experience. Especially it is significant to provide good affordance, clear signifiers and appropriate feedbacks to respond.
- Budget & Price
- Filter & Search Bar Design
- Cancellation
- Wrong Click & Unexpected Feedback
Personas:
I created 2 personas based on the interviewees I interviewed to embody the needs the of users.
Task Flow:
I created a task flow for visualizing user journey from opening foodora app to adding product to the food cart. 4 out of 7 users in my research indicates that inspirations or reviews can be helpful for them to find the food they want. With a flow chart, it’s easier to have a concrete idea that which part of the task flow can be improved. In this case, the goal is giving an efficient way for “Inspiration” and increasing the relevant information for users to find the food they’re interested in.
What’s Next?
After finishing the first 2 parts of this case, the next step is having a look of the current UI and interaction design, analyzing it and starting ideation for sketching a prototype. All the design approach and solution will be included in the 2nd article of this series. Thanks for reading and Welcome for comments and suggestions :)
See you soon!
