Assignment 3 + 4 + 5 + 6: Research Plan
Group 1
02.16.2021
Assignment 3:
Secondary Research
- Restaurant and bar limitations
- Lowest risk dining is delivery/takeout/drive thru/curb-side
- promote behaviors to reduce spread (make, staying home, wash hands, signage, supplies)
- cleaning, disinfecting
- layout of spaces
- avoiding group events
- mask use
- reconfiguring dining/kitchen spaces
- takeout/delivery
- strengthen community infrastructure to support local business
- restaurants currently close tables and spread out guests dining-in…A lot of places depend on revenue from delivery and ordering out
- adapt to customers demands // assess customers
- plan for a vaiety of scenarios… find ways to reach customers
- many lost jobs and turned to food delivery apps for work
- huge demand for delivery
- pay is erratic, workers are constantly at risk, and they are not treated great by both restaurants and app companies
- more people are eating from home
- dine-in came to a halt
- restaurants are having to rely on delivery apps to survive
- some apps are giving options to donate to restaurants to support them
RESEARCH PLAN
Re-state your research question (Narrowed down as appropriate)
“ How can we better optimise food delivery services to ensure safety, efficiency, and equity during the pandemic?”
Are there participants? Who are they? How could you recruit or contact them?
- Rachel’s sister worked for Postmates. Other friends that have worked for delivery companies.
- Recruiting other people who worked for food delivery services.
- Interviewing independent restaurants that rely on food delivery services. (Emailing them questions)
- People who rely on food delivery services
- asking peers or friends about their experiences at restaurants or ordering food
What do we already know?
- We have our own experiences from going to or ordering from restaurants in this pandemic
- restaurants are suffering due to loss in business
- restaurants/food business are complicated systems and connect various different people, making it difficult to find solutions in pandemic situations
What sort of activities are involved? Does it involve people trying out a prototype, an online workshop, interviewing people, building something?
- Evaluative — Rose Thorn Bud, A/B Testing
- Generative Research: Interviews, Observation
- Descriptive research methods to understand how food delivery services work: empathy, stakeholder maps, Love Letters/Break up Letters
- Causal — Affinity Diagramming, Kano Analysis
What would you know at the end, that you don’t know now?
- how restaurants systems function and their relationship with different delivery services
- What are the systematic issues in food delivery services that perpetuates bad treatment of essential workers, how can this be changed in the future as demand for delivery services increase
- How can we better optimise food delivery services
- What is the future of food delivery services, how will restaurants adapt, will there be a shift towards restaurants providing their own services or will the market become oversaturated?
Who would find your insights useful beyond you? Is it other designers, people from an external organization, the participants themselves? etc
- This will benefit people who are working under restaurants or food delivery services as well as anyone who enjoys eating food from restaurants (both dining-in and ordering-out experiences).
02.18.2021 // 02.21.2021
Assignment 4:
For this assignment, we then got together to organize all the information we gathered last time into a visual on Miro. This helped us get a clearer understanding of the potential scope and direction of the project.
02.23.2021
Assignment 5 :
Following our three minutes presentation, we were able to get a better idea of areas that needed to be refined in our research plan. It was great to get feedback from our professors and peers as well as seeing how other groups are approaching their research plans!
First, we revisited our research question. We specifically started thinking about where there are gaps that we can focus on improving food delivery in pandemic like situations. (treatment of delivery workers? system between companies and workers and restaurants? specify stakeholder?). From our secondary research, we thought there was definitely an opportunity for improvement in regards to the treatment of delivery workers from delivery companies, restaurants, and customers. In this pandemic situation, they are coninually put at risk, still aren’t paid enough, and are not really given much thought.
New Research Question: How can we improve the treatment of food delivery services that are working during the Pandemic?
In regards to research methods, we had orginally listed multiple methods within each of the four categories that we thought would be helpful. Needing to be more realistic, we went back and narrowed down our plan to a couple methods.
We chose interviews, love/breakup letter, and empathy maps. We would like to start with interviews to get personal insight from 2–3 delivery workers which we can then use to inform the love/breakup letter and empathy maps.
In the beginning, we would like to conduct some interviews over text or phone to get a foundation on our stakeholders insights.
We thought love/breakup letters would be a great way to see what delivery workers appreciate or get frustrated about in their work and the company they work for. Empathy maps will aid in developing empathy for the stakeholders and understanding their perspective in this complex food-pandemic system.
We continued to write down our ideas, questions, and research links on a miro board.
A couple more resources:
(We also found some reddit threads that we thought might be helpful to find more delivery worker insights.)
- delivery workers heavily rely on tips, but a lot of people do not even tip …
- pay goes down every time an item is subsituted… which is difficult due to dwindling resources from pandemic
- no special access to warehouses so shopping with all other shoppers
- fear for safety
- shutting down dining and shrinking restaurant staff leads to longer wait time for delivery people
- risks higher and benefits lower
02.27.2021 // 02.28.2021
Assignment 6:
We met to discuss ourfocus, interview questions, and what each person planned to accomplish over the weekend.
We decided to focus specifically on the treatment of workers with grocery delivery services. Our refind question is : How can we improve the treatment of grocery delivery workers that are working during the Pandemic?
When discussing interview questions, we wanted to come up with 4 to 5 solid questions that would lead us to solid finding and give more insight into working for grocery delivery services.
Rachel reached out to some people she knows have worked for instacart to ask them to write love/break-up letters to instacart. It was interesting to see similarities and differences among the letters and how each of the participants felt in regards to working for the service.
Some interesting points:
- some good organization within the app… can see all information about an order before accepting
- the app tells you where some items are…, but it is not always updated and you can search for a long time and not find anything.
- customer service is slow
- “busiest times” and “peak time” are not accurate and can be frustrating when trying to pick times to work.
- Instacart allows “no tip” which takes away incentive to work and doesn’t reflect hard work of employees. (Minimum wage pay not enough)
- Difficult to carry groceries, especially up flights of stairs
- Good when people are nice and quick to respond… hard when no response or customer is difficult
