Designing Marketer — Deliveroo’s first restaurant ad platform
From experiment to pilot to MVP
Here at Deliveroo, our product teams are split into four key areas — Consumer, Delivery, Restaurants and Growth. And for each of these key areas, we have dedicated product designers, content designers and researchers that function in sub-teams. When I first joined Deliveroo a little under two years ago, I was in the Consumer team working on projects for the app and website that we all know and use. There’s a couple of designers in this team, so I was accustomed to having the time to work on a project from concept all the way to implementation. A couple of months in, I joined the Growth team as their sole designer. Looking back now, I’m glad I did.
Whenever I’d had conversations with Growth colleagues, it was mostly about hacking their way through the product with a marginal gains approach. As a product designer, this didn’t really sound exciting and “hacking” threw me off because we’re the advocates for our users, championing good user experience. Soon after I joined the team however, I discovered that it’s not just about the incremental numbers. In fact it’s a super interesting team to be in as a designer. And through all the failed experiments (and some successful ones), I’ve learned how to better balance user and business needs.
It’s every designer’s conundrum but in practice, designing a good user experience and moving growth metrics actually go hand in hand.
The Growth team is constantly investing time and effort in new systems to help grow our business. We recently shipped a new Restaurant Ad platform a.k.a Marketer — a set of tools that restaurants can use to have better control of their own business growth on our platform. While I can write a lot about the design decisions behind the project, I actually want to talk more to what happens after the design process is done. The design industry lacks discussion around this part of the product phase, so I’ll be focusing on that as well as the key challenges in launching Marketer globally.
The first experiment
For the first experiment, we wanted to learn if there was a demand for offers and promotions with our consumers. We set out the hypothesis as — if we increase the visibility of offers in the app, then users are more likely to redeem an offer. It was essential that this hypothesis was validated as quickly and easily as possible. The team had two options:
- Design and build an entire feature that presents restaurant offers in a feed that could possibly take months
- Use an existing feature with a third party tool that we already use
As you may have guessed, we opted for the second (after much deliberation).
“Let’s just use a third party tool!”
Third party tools can be tough to work with from a designer’s perspective. Don’t get me wrong, they get the job done and there are some great ones out there. But they’re rarely built to handle more nuanced user needs you want to design for. It may be the simplest and fastest solution, but sometimes it comes at the expense of good user experience. Is it worth it? In this particular instance, yes it was.
I gotta admit, it was painful at first but it paid off. By using an existing feature with this tool, we were able to roll out and learn quickly from the results. We validated our hypothesis and with no surprise, it turns out that there was a huge appetite for offers and promotions with our consumers. Who doesn’t love a good deal, right?
From this experiment, we were more confident that the next phase of the project was to build a self-service tool whereby restaurant partners can promote their own offers and discounts on the Deliveroo platform.
Moving on to the pilot
With our hypothesis validated, what next? To get the creative juices flowing, I moved on to creating a mood board by gathering screenshots of similar examples from other tools. Although an old-school process, this helped me find the right design direction and establish a solid foundation on the user experience.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
As I moved into low fidelity designs, I created multiple scratch files with different variations of the user flow. The mood board helped me get into the mindset of how existing B2B (business-to-business) tools function in this landscape. It also helped me identify common, reusable UI patterns. This is especially important for B2B tools as the core user just wants to get the job done. So this wasn’t going to be the place to reinvent the wheel unless absolutely necessary.
We launched our pilot in a different market to see if it resonated more broadly as the buying culture there was completely different. What we learned from the results was that there was actually a universal need for restaurants to promote their business and there were no objections to the concept of being able to do that through the tool. Having received positive feedback, we continued to build Marketer with the main objective to launch in other markets as a MVP (minimum viable product).
On to the MVP!
Phew! We’ve come a long way.
After nine long months, around 472 pull requests and all the learnings from our experimentation and the pilot, we’ve finally rolled out globally to our core restaurant partners.
The big impact
So how is Marketer doing so far? Let’s take a look.
On average, restaurants get 25% more orders and a 32% boost in menu visits when they run an offer with Marketer. Our product marketing team conducted case studies to go in-depth on how restaurants are using Marketer. Here’s how some of them are using it to influence their demand.
From research findings through to one of Marketer’s earliest offers created on our platform, we’ve known that restaurant owners care about attracting new customers. Our partners at Lost Boys Chicken were no exception. They experimented with a 4-hour offer straight after Marketer launched and as a result, they saw a 3x increase in orders compared to their previous period. That’s massive! The main use case of Marketer for them was to make money from remaining stock while attracting new customers, with the additional benefit of reducing waste.
With Arancini Bros, their shop in Old Street competes with a lot of other restaurants so it was important for them to stand out in the already crowded neighbourhood. They experimented with a week-long offer that went to all customers, driving 28% more orders compared to the previous period. They’re a lot more prominent in the area now and it was more impactful than anything else they’ve tried before.
It was an incredible journey and through the entire process, I’ve learnt so much about the restaurant industry and what affects business operations. Working on a tool that causes a behavioural shift in one of the oldest industries was deeply satisfying to learn from. A number of our restaurant partners have even started using Marketer to plan their marketing strategy, sometimes giving it a starring role — this is big!
Below are some of the key takeaways that were crucial in the launch and success of Marketer.
Collaboration is key
At Deliveroo, designers are usually embedded within a key area and focus on achieving goals for that specific team. It’s rare that we get to work on a project that crosses over two separate key areas, purely because of the breadth of our products. But I had the great privilege of doing so. Restaurants can access Marketer when they log in to their account — somewhere they can also manage their performance on Deliveroo. This meant that Marketer cut across both the Restaurants and the Growth team. The Restaurants team have their own set of products, so it was a steep learning curve having to understand a whole new ecosystem. However, this also created opportunities for cross-team collaboration and opened up the idea of cross-team projects. Having weekly design crits and desk conversations (lots of them) helped me get up to speed and made things less daunting.
Since moving to Figma, we’ve become more transparent as a team with the additional benefits of cross-team collaboration. We stick to a naming convention whenever we create new projects, making it easy for anyone to jump into files for a peek. This was great as I had the ability to better understand the complexity of the products linked to Marketer in the Restaurants ecosystem.
Collaborating with content designers also became seamless and the design process as a whole became more efficient. We didn’t need to manage conflicted Sketch files anymore and the ability to work on the same file simultaneously did wonders.
Managing feedback
“Make the button red. Move the button 16px to the right.”
Don’t you just love hearing such comments? (Ha!) Working on a high stakes project that crossed two key areas, there was plenty of sharing sessions with key stakeholders. It was important to learn how to differentiate feedback from opinions. Of course it was a challenge at the beginning, but with the help of my manager and through persistence — I’ve learnt how to filter out opinions and focus on the constructive feedback. If there’s a piece of feedback that you don’t particularly agree with, you acknowledge it but ultimately, you’re accountable for the designs that you produce.
Designing for simplicity
Restaurant staff are busy people. The tool needs to get straight to the point. Our amazing research team conducted in-depth fieldwork studies in some of our key markets to investigate the perception of a self-service tool as well as running usability testing sessions. As a designer, it’s important to get your work out into the field to better understand how customers interact with the designs so you can improve it based on the findings.
After speaking to several restaurant partners in six of our key markets, there were clear observations that we needed to carefully consider when building Marketer.
Here’s the five key design principles that I set out in the course of this project.
1. Make things easy to find
It was clear that the primary actions needed to be at the forefront. Doesn’t this apply to all other designs, you ask? Yes, definitely but this is especially evident in a B2B tool. Our core users for Marketer don’t have the time to look for a button or a piece of information. So keep important information visible at all times as there’s no room for ambiguity.
2. Use the right language
Business people speak in a different language. I’m talking about acquisition, engagement, retention. They care deeply about the business and their main objective is growth. It became imperative to express the proposition of Marketer clearly and explain how using the tool would allow you to directly influence your demand within the Deliveroo ecosystem.
3. Keep it snappy
In the attempt to make the process feel less daunting, we divided the jobs into smaller steps. This helps to reduce cognitive load and keeps the user focused with a specific job at one time. Be careful not to overload the user with too much information and let users perform tasks consecutively, not simultaneously.
4. Don’t assume context of usage
Tools are meant to be mostly used on a desktop. Nope, incorrect! This assumption was toppled over during one of our restaurant visits when the business owner walked in whilst checking his monthly performance on his iPhone (shock!). So, ensure your tool can be easily accessed on a mobile device.
5. Provide context at every step
Getting stuck sucks especially when you’re stuck in a tool that’s supposed to help you run your business. As mentioned earlier, the tool needs to be able to speak for itself. By providing contextual information at every step, it alleviates any issues that they may encounter. Remember to include a contact person too, just in case users need some form of assistance.
Don’t be afraid of failure
Being the sole designer in this project, I felt a lot of weight on my shoulders. This was the first ever project that I’ve worked on that had the potential to drive an enormous influence on someone else’s business and ultimately many people’s livelihood. The more I thought about it, the crazier it seemed.
It was a mountain to climb, but I slowly gained momentum and undoubtedly gained valuable skills from it. The crucial thing that I reminded myself was to take one step at a time and never give up.
At the end of the day, it’s all worth it.
So.. is this the last of Marketer?
Not even close! As the MVP continues its phased roll out, the Growth team is tirelessly finding new ways to improve and expand Marketer. Offers and discounts is only a small piece of a bigger puzzle, and we’re slowly solving it, piece by piece.
Keen puzzle solver? Join us — we’re hiring!
Designed in collaboration with Rhiannon Jones, Lydia Howland and Selina Parmar — with thanks to the product team, data scientists and engineers.
Special thanks to Sana Rao and Ryan Cordell.
