KFC Delivery Portal Redesign
Making an essential service more usable
The circuit breaker has had a deep impact on how we go about daily life, and one big trend is the movement from in-person food service to delivery.
Companies that have long-established food delivery services — such as KFC — are well positioned to capitalise on this big change, and sure enough they have seen spikes in demand during this period. (The fact that one major competitor was temporarily out of the game must have helped, too.)
But as people flock to the different fast food portals to order their meals, do these portals offer a good user experience? And how can they be made better? We took a look at KFC’s own delivery web portal and did some testing with real users to find out.
Planning
We decided to approach the KFC website by focusing on its usability. When hungry users are looking to get some delicious fried chicken, does the website make things easy for them?
From a preliminary assessment of the website, we came up with three main tasks that would help us identify usability problems in the website. The tasks were as follows.
Task 1:
You feel like eating a Zinger Burger meal (Not Zinger Box), just the burger with a medium-sized coke and would like to upgrade normal fries to cheese fries. You are ordering it for yourself.
Task 2:
The rest of your family would like to share a bucket of chicken. They want a 10-Piece Sharing Feast with 5 Original flavour and 5 Hot & Crispy chicken.
Task 3:
Your family suddenly changed their minds, and decided that they want 8 pieces of the Original flavoured chicken, and only 2 pieces of Hot & Crispy instead. Help them change their order.
Problems and Fixes
Some of the usability problems with the website were evident, even with just 5 tests. Based on this feedback, we carried out a quick redesign and produced a prototype of our redesigned KFC portal.
Here’s some of the problems we found, and how we solved them:
Unclear Categorisation. Since KFC mainly serves chicken, it was unclear to users what falls under categories such as ‘chicken’, or ‘boxes’. (Don’t the boxes all have chicken as well?)
Even more confusingly, the Zinger box is not actually just the Zinger meal. But it’s under Meals, which is where people naturally go.
This led to a lot of confusion among users trying to do Task 1; in fact, all of our 5 users got lost trying to order a Zinger meal. Some ended up buying a Zinger box, which is easy to find, but is not what they’re looking for.
Our Solution: To solve this problem, we improved the categorisation of items, with four categories that are more understandable: Chicken, Burgers/Wraps, Boxes, and Bowls.
We also improved the visibility of the options by placing them above the main image, at the top of the screen. This means users don’t have to scroll up and down to figure out where they are in the website, and is a closer fit with user expectations where navigation options tend to be at the top of the screen.
In subsequent testing, users found this to be a lot clearer, and all users managed to find the correct Zinger meal and place an order.
Split up User Flows. A key part of ordering delivery is to give your delivery address, but KFC splits up this task into two parts. One part comes right at the start, when you give your post code…
… while the second part, with your full address, comes only at the very end of the checkout process.
This confused many of our first round users, with some expressing concern about whether the process would work properly: If they don’t know my address, how to deliver to me?
Our Solution: We got around this problem by putting this task back together, and placing it at the start of the ordering process.
In our second round of testing, users reported that this put them at ease about having the order delivered to them correctly.
Editing Orders and User Control. When we designed Task 3, we suspected that users might feel negatively about KFC’s current order confirmation process. This is because the current process has no way for users to edit their orders.
Sure enough, this concern was raised by all of our first round users, who were annoyed when they had to redo the entire ordering process in order to change one thing.
Our Solution: We placed a call to action to Modify Item at the check-out. After all, it’s the place to confirm your order, so you should be able to change your order too!
When we tested our prototype with users, they were all relieved that they could make changes here instead of having to redo the order. Given that KFC orders are often sharing-oriented, you can imagine how much time and effort it would take to re-order everything.
Conclusion
You may have noticed that we did not carry out major changes to how the website looks, in our redesign. This is intentional, and backed by our testing, where users don’t have a problem with the website not looking good.
What they had problems with, was a website that did not behave as they expected it to. And that’s what we really wanted to focus on — to ensure that diners know what they are doing, can find what they want, and have the control to get a meal that’s really finger-licking good.
How can you also improve your website’s usability, and use that to drive better customer outcomes?
You can find out more about what Reassemble does through our portfolio. Or arrange a date to talk to us, and find out what user-centred design can do for your business.
