Design Critique #5: DoorDash(iOS)
Hello Again!
A lot is happening in the world right now. We hope you’re doing as well as you can be: please be sure to take time to process everything that’s going on, and take care of your families, yourselves, and the community.
Also, be sure to take time to remember and celebrate all the beauty and joy in the world and “Stay Calm and Keep Critique!”
During the quarantine time, a lot of us switch to online food delivery service to continue supporting the local business and to satisfy our taste buds. In this week’s design critique, we choose to discuss DoorDash. We hope our discussion can inspire your interest in App Critique and your comments and suggestions are always welcome.
Introduction
DoorDash Inc. is a San Francisco-based on-demand prepared food delivery service founded in 2013. As of last May, it had expanded to more than 4,000 cities and offers a selection of 340,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada. I use DoorDash frequently during this quarantine time. As a user switch from Uber Eats to DoorDash, I enjoy DoorDash’s colorful design and first 30-day $0 deliver fee. While we love the simplicity and convenience of DoorDash, we found some debatable points and we would love to share them with you!
Food Ordering
The food ordering process in DoorDash is easy and straightforward to most of the users who use food delivery service before. Starting with select filters and cuisines, then select dishes and lastly make payment. Here, we want to mainly discuss three sections.
Pickup
The pickup page provides a map of the nearby stores of your current location. It allows users to pick up the food in a store. The map view is clear and convenient for users to view nearby restaurants. Users can select stores through either map view or list view.
When I open the Map View (left picture above), I can see lots of restaurants’ names and “map” icons overlay each other. This is difficult for users to know what are the restaurants in this area. If we zoom in the map, we are able to see the names of restaurants however, it’s still difficult for users to identify what is the main cuisine category of this restaurant based on the restaurant name. Similarly, for the list views (right picture above), there is a long list of restaurants that is hard for users to select their interested restaurants without filter. Therefore, we suggest adding on the filter at the pickup page.
We also acknowledge that the reason that DoorDash doesn’t include the filter feature may be: users should be familiar with their nearby restaurants. therefore, it’s not necessary to provide them extra filters. However, based on design consistency and thinking from the user’s perspective, a filter is important to help users quickly find the restaurants that they want to visit.
Help!
For most service providers, it is super important to provide customers the immediate support when they need it. A common situation for food delivery service is: the application shows my order has arrived but I didn’t see it, how to contact the delivery person?
In the current DoorDash design, after an order is completed, it’s hard to find the delivery person’s information. In fact, it doesn’t provide a live chat feature on the app. It is very difficult for users to contact to the delivery person or any support representatives from DoorDash.
DoorDash website provides the live chat support feature, however, for most users, they tend to use the mobile app to order food and track delivery. Forcing users to switch to the desktop website is not a good user-centered design practice. Thus, we suggest DoorDash add live chat support feature in their mobile app version to provide users immediate and efficient support.
Rating System
DoorDash uses star rating, $$ rating and number of comments to rate stores. Similar as we mentioned in Yelp’s critique, $$ and star rating criteria are not clear to customers. On average, how much will a person spend on a “$$” restaurant? Unclear criteria cause difficulty for users to make purchasing decisions.
In addition, DoorDash provides the number of ratings without detailed user comments. This is an interesting approach. On the one hand, the number of ratings serves a strong indication of how popular the store is and it is very clean and clear in design. Besides, For 2 stores both rating 4.8 stars, the store with more than 5000 people rating 4.8 stars is more convincing than a store with 53 people rating 4.8 stars. On the other hand, without general comments but the simple rating system, it is difficult for consumers to make a judgment of these ratings. What did the person order (that caused him) to give 4.8 stars? Is it because of the specific food that the person give such a high rating? This is an interesting approach that DoorDash chooses.
Moreover, compared to Yelp, DoorDash allows merchants to upload high-quality photos. On the one hand, this provides visual pleasure to end-users, on the other hand, some users mentioned that they doubt about the real quality of the food.
Design Consistency and Edge Case Design
Besides the features and functionality of DoorDash, we also want to highlight some design issues existing in DoorDash.
Inconsistent “Back” Design
The “Back” design is inconsistent in different pages which confuse users “Am I using the same DoorDash app?”:
Confusing Status
Users are confused about certain color choices in DoorDash.
- The grey-out area on the above-left picture indicates the store is currently closed, however, the usage of green color and green checkmark looks like a safe option to choose.
- In the above-left picture, why is the 4.8 rating in green while the second 4.6 rating is in grey? What does the green checkmark mean?
- Even the store is closed, users can still add items to their cart (in the above right picture). For the stores that are closed, “close” sign is in small font and grey color. The page emphasizes viewing cart and continuing ordering. For the stores that are currently closed, it is more reasonable to disable the menu and dish selection options on the page.
Edge Case Design
A lot of times, it is very important for designers to consider edge cases during their design. When we design the Hi-Fidelity prototype, put a placeholder to represent text is not enough. We need to consider the maximum length of the text, the number of lines of text, etc.
- Here are some examples in DoorDash:
- The above-left picture cut the keywords after Vegetarian (with only the first letter “P”), which confuses users. Moreover, if users click on that restaurant, there are no additional keywords after vegetarian. This applies to all the restaurants on the list. We are quite confused about this design consistency.
- The above is a random restaurant near my current place, the name of the restaurant is only three words, however, the text is long enough that it is difficult to notice the “Delete” action button. In addition, the “Delete”, “Back”, and the restaurant’s name are using the same size, font and color which confuses users.
Takeaways
Thanks to all these food delivery services, we can continue enjoying food at this “Stay at home” period. Even though the experience of using DoorDash is simple and smooth, we noticed lots of detailed design problems during our critique session of DoorDash. Besides the main functionality problems and design problems we mentioned in the above discussion, we also discussed the UX writing problem during on-boarding, the confusing steps of the group order. If you are interested in critique or design a food delivery application, here are some questions you can start with:
- What are the necessary food filters for users? (Think about categories of food, distance, monetary, delivery time, etc.) How to help users to find the restaurants they want?
- What is the optimized way to provide enough customer support without placing additional burdens on existing support staff？
- How to design the users’ review session?
- With an increasing number of designers in the team, how do we ensure that design consistency and edge cases are incorporated into design decisions?
- How to design group order services that allow multiple users to access the same cart from separate devices? What are the important constraints to consider here?
Up Next
Thank you for reading!
Music is quite important in our daily life, so we choose Spotify as our next week’s app. What is your experience of using Spotify? Do you like it? Feel free to shoot us any ideas that you have!
See you next week! Stay safe and healthy!
