Menus to Mmmmenus : A UX case study
A walkthrough at how we put the drool back in our menus as Swiggy scaled.
When I started with Swiggy in Feb 2018, we were present in 50 cities across India. Fast forward a year and a half, we are in 500 cities.
So scale is awesome right? It’s a sign of a good business with a healthy transacting user base that justifies the need your product is filling.
Except…
With great scale comes great boredom and confusion for the user. We now faced a massive discovery issue with hundreds and thousands of new restaurants being added onto the platform.
So you end up with a heavily transactional platform where
EVERY menu looks the same.
Swiggy being primarily a food delivery company, menus are the heart of our business. As we scaled beyond being an aggregator, we realised that we really needed to do more to understand and create better discovery of food for our users while making sure we scale that.
A narrow narrative (a narrowtive if you will :P ) at a platform level scale is very dangerous. We had to really look beyond the traditional ‘ADD’ button solves everything thought process. Users look at the food ordering very differently.
Food is a very personal and intimate affair. Food is indulgence, opinion, choice and very much a fabric of what can make or break a person’s day.
Thus, we decided to take our first step into our Menu redesign with a simple goal in mind….
Drool driven decisions!
My first deep dive started with a walk around town. I really wanted to look at how effectively brands and stores merchandise their menus for walk ins.
* Bad idea to have done this while on a weight loss diet. *
14 restaurants later I had enough to kick off a more insightful workshop with my Product Manager and Researcher.
After this, we were able to give ourselves the main scope for what we wanted to solve with V1. Solve for:
- User’s intent (indulgence, curiosity, value)
- Restaurant’s Presence and relevance
- Item level decision making
- Sub category spotlights
- Scalable merchandising
- and most importantly… DROOL!
Presenting… TOP NOMS!
We launched ‘Top Noms’ and reminded ourselves about the joy of food ordering. It wasn’t just an exercise on giving more affordance and with an image or asset. We started looking at the numbers and realised there is real validation in having people visualise themselves eating the item you propose and actually having food converse back with the user.
Then we set out to solve another big task. Curating menus with need states in mind. The typical foodie loves choices. The curse of multi cuisine choices. We started looking at the needs and expectations people had from restaurants along these lines.
SO.MANY.NEEDS!
After I pitched and iterated 3,452 times towards the final new UX for these menus, we steakholders (yay another pun! :) took the leap of faith.
With the support of a stellar and charged up UX research, merchandising, product, business and sourcing team, we cautiously launched these menu experiences with a carefully curated set of restaurants.
Once the pilot results came in, we were elated.
EVERY restaurant we piloted this with saw a tremendous increase in engagement, conversion, healthy cart values and better connect with their beloved foodies through food. :)
I can’t disclose numbers, but treat this graph as a general nod towards what this project did for us.. :D
This then jump started a lot more innovation to be done around menus. We built an entire charter around effective decision making [Yes.. my PM loves EDM :D] where we looked building more goodness and ways to connect more with our menus.
