Being a designer at Deliveroo
I’ve been part of the team at Deliveroo for 5 months now, since leaving blinkbox in July. It seems like a lot longer for all the right reasons: the people are amazing and the output has been insane. It doesn’t feel like we’re just building a team, but a family, one that I am very proud to be apart of.
I’ve been predominately working on our mobile offering, which initially was just iOS but we are now deep into building our Android app. There are so many unforeseen challenges when it comes to designing an app for a start up company that is expanding so rapidly and in a completely new market. We’re having to inform customers and create new industry standards on an international stage. It has been one of the most productive times in my career so far and I hope to continue this.
Design Community
One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most has been getting more involved with the London design community, whether it be working with fantastic agencies, meeting Mr Bingo or going to events like Design+Banter and the newly created Data Mates.
It’s been an incredible few months for meeting new people and some of the response and recognition has been fantastic. Our Head of Design at Deliveroo (Simon) did a talk at November’s D+B, on being introduced to the stage the organiser Gearóid said that he’d been assembling one of the best new design teams in London 😱.
This was such a highlight for me as I thoroughly believe that my colleagues are some of the best designers in London, which is no surprise when our team consists of people formerly at companies like Osper, Hailo and GDS.
We touch everything
Some of the things we do here are not necessarily new tactics however they are effective in our approach to problem solving, user experience and design. We all have our own 8ft x 4ft foam board that we use to display anything from things we’re working on, user flows, hunger inducing images of food or just funny pictures of people in the office.
We have been recently using a method our consumer lead calls “Crazy Eights” or Jonny’s happy time (coined by Google Ventures), where we use a HIIT timer to come up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes around a central theme. Sounds easy right? It’s not. The first time we did it 2 of my “ideas” were just smiley faces, but we’ve actually had some pretty good concepts come from these sessions.
We have been running user testing sessions which has been vital in us becoming more data and research driven. Between this and working with the amazing start-up company NomNom who aggregate all of our customer feedback from a variety of sources: Zendesk, social media, app feedback etc. We are beginning to spot pain points and validate our user stories in a much more detailed way, which leads to more informed features.
Prototyping
This is something I have been doing more and more of for a couple of years now as it’s such an effective way of getting an idea across, nothing can get lost in translation if you’ve basically built the exact way you expect something to work. Plus it enables us to test new features during customer research sessions, get feedback, iterate and test again.
I could turn this into a piece about which is the best prototyping tool on the market but I don’t feel the world needs another versus article. You should try as many as you can and make your own decision based of what works best for your needs.
I personally use Marvel for full app flows, Principle for quick screen to screen animations and Pixate for more complex prototypes.
