‘Feeling Lucky’ while ordering food online

Ordering food online is a daily routine for some set of population(I am one among those). There are many such consumers who order food online regularly. Although food ordering apps have been constantly improving their UI/UX, none of them have still addressed the problem of some new challenges that have evolved in this process.

This is the challenge
One primitive question that pops on the head when you have to place an order for food is ‘What to order?’. Deciding what to eat today eats up a good amount of your time and scrolling through the long list of restaurants and the menus is definitely not a pleasant experience. You finally settle up for something. Sometimes trying something new and sometimes the same regular food you mostly order and get done with it.

There are filters by cuisine, price range, restaurant ratings and the popular items in each restaurant but it doesn’t seem to help completely.

Tweak

This is in fact not a small tweak but a feature in itself which requires some good efforts.

How about a button on the food ordering app to ‘Surprise Me’, when you don’t want to spend time deciding what to eat. Clicking on the button just asks you one question — “Meal for how many?” and Boom!

An algo runs in the background and fetches the meal for you based on various parameters, broadly like ‘Cuisines in your past orders’ and ‘Price range per meal’.
Making use of the filters and the popular items in each restaurant in a different way.

You will be directly taken to the payment screen with the final amount for your order and the meal will be discrete until you receive the order.

Showing the dish before hand and giving an option to the user to ‘Surprise Me’ again would not do much good as the users would keep trying for a new dish for something better and could get stuck in an infinite loop.

After the food is delivered, take user’s feedback if the surprise was a thumbs up or a thumbs down and train the algorithm to constantly make it better.

Better use of data on what other users with similar preferences like, can help overall users discover more new restaurants and dishes that they might actually like.
Increases the number of new users ordering from a restaurant. (Some motivation for the food ordering apps to work on this ;-P )

Looking forward to see this feature rolled out by one of the apps soon.

Swiggy/Foodpanda/UberEats? Who’s gonna be first?

Tiwaaa!!!