The UX of three of India’s hottest food delivery startups

In this hyper-competitive market, user experience can make or break a startup.

Three of India’s hottest food delivery startups

It’s been a big year for food delivery startups in India. Thirty-one startups have raised $161.5 million in investment capital in what has been called a $6 billion market.

But the space is fiercely competitive, so a good topic of lunch conversation (while eating your just delivered food) is who will survive.

Here’s how I look at it as a UX Designer:

Who is the user? Young working professionals in India’s urban hubs (e.g., Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad)

What is the user’s experience of the problem? I spent 2 weeks working with Bangalore’s young startup founders as Asia Regional Manager of Seedstars World, so I got to both directly experience and gather some anecdotal insight:

1. Walking to a restaurant is really not an option. On 98% of the city’s roads, there are no sidewalks. (Here’s a good Quora post on why).
2. Traffic is a gridlock anytime of the day. You can take a motorbike but you’re likely to return dusty and sweaty — not the best look for that post-lunch client meeting.

Bangalore traffic via The Times of Bengaluru

3. Value of efficiency: Given the immense friction in just getting around town, the young working population will pay for getting the basic things done quickly — ordering food, doing laundry, getting home. On-demand apps are here to save the day.

In Bangalore it’s clear the on-demand food delivery startups are solving a real problem, so the difference is really in the “how.”

Out of curiosity, I put three of the hottest food delivery apps — TinyOwl, Swiggy, and Zomato Order — through a usability test based on three user scenarios:

Scenario #1: First-time user downloads app to make a lunch order.

For a first-time user, the goal is to deliver an experience that gets the user to achieve his or her goal efficiently and smoothly. If successful, you’re setting yourself up for retaining the user. Here I looked for a clean, easy-to-use homepage that facilitates glanceability and scanability. Remember your user’s goal: She wants to eat ASAP.

General observations:

All three apps try to cram a lot into the homepage. Here’s an aggregate list of the content I have to process on just the homepage of these apps:

1. Work address
2. Search criteria (restaurants vs dishes vs items)
3. Name of restaurant
4. Restaurant logo / food image
5. Address / neighborhood of restaurant
6. Type of food
7. Minimum delivery order amount
8. Rating

When designing for mobile, it’s important to design for the skimmer. The user isn’t going to comprehend eight data points in the one or two glances she invests in the homepage.

The design goal here is to select the most relevant information to display on the homepage. Here’s a quick and dirty test for figuring that out: ask 10–15 users what first comes to mind when they order food. Listen to their responses. Make sure the top 3–5 most commonly named items are on the homepage. Don’t be afraid to leave the rest out in favor of much-needed white space.

Who has the best UX?

For a first-time user experience, the edge goes to Swiggy for its:

• Use of color and space hierarchy to enhance scanability: Swiggy best utilized color, dividers, and white space to organize the information on the homepage and help the user easily differentiate among the restaurants. By making the search results easy to scan and read, the app is helping the user get to her goal of ordering some lunch.
• Compelling visual imagery: Alright, raise your hand if you’ve gotten hungry from looking at pictures of food. Yea, I’m looking at you, foodstagrammers. Swiggy and Zomato Order both tap into our human love of food pictures, but Swiggy gets the edge for making the image large enough for easy scanability. Don’t make your users squint!
• Feature decisions align with business strategy — Swiggy has publicly stated that its differentiation is providing the fastest delivery, so it makes sense for the delivery time to be emphasized visually using three elements: the placement (on right hand side, removed from the other information), shape (circle), and color (bright green). Here it seems Swiggy is tapping into the importance of delivery time to a user’s decision-making process for food selection. Interesting to note that Zomato Order and Tiny Owl have chosen to emphasize restaurant rating instead. Here’s a good opportunity to A/B test to see if featuring rating or delivery time more prominently affects the speed or volume of transactions.

Scenario #2: User is hungry for some biryani. She wants to know if it’s an option at the restaurant her friend recommended.

Here the user needs a smooth search and navigation experience to meet her goal, so the app should provide a logical information architecture:

General Observations

• Well-designed interfaces anticipate the user’s goals. When prioritizing what and how much content to display in a search result screen for biryani, it’s important to think not just about the user’s immediate search goal but also their next goal: purchase.
• Given the limited real estate of a search result screen, keep it simple. Each app has interpreted the amount and type of information the user needs at this point in the flow a bit differently. For instance TinyOwl assumes the user needs the most detail — menu item, description of item, price, and option to add. Also it was a bit buggy —the overcrowding of the text made it hard to read the content.

Who has the best UX?

Here Zomato Order gets the edge for its:

• Clear and appealing “Add” option. It’s green (a color associated with “go”) and visually stands out against the white background.
• TinyOwl has also included a “+” button, but it doesn’t stand out significantly from the other grayscaled content on the screen. Here’s another good opportunity for an A/B test: it might not seem like color could move the needle, but it’s worth trying if you’re not seeing high conversions from search to purchase.

Scenario #3: User isn’t sure what she wants to eat, but knows she wants <1 hour delivery time, Italian food, and under 500 rupiah for two people.

When the user’s goal isn’t quite as specific (read: she doesn’t know what she wants and wants the app to help), the dynamic Filter feature should guide the user through the search process. Here it’s important to consider again the information architecture, i.e., the categories to show the users and the hierarchy.

General observations:

• The first option should be what’s most important to users when searching for food options. Each app has also interpreted this differently.
• Tiny Owl: min order, delivery time, rating
• Swiggy: price, delivery time
• Zomato Order: free delivery, online payment acceptance, vegetarian, bookmarked
• It’s interesting to see this different interpretation because each app is targeting a similar user: the young working professional. Curious, I asked ~10 users what they comes to mind when trying to decide what to eat. Most commonly I heard this order: cuisine, price, and distance of restaurant / delivery time. Keeping in mind that users may say they value “x” but really decide based on “y”, the key here is to (a) eliminate irrelevant categories and (b) constantly test the order of the options to see if it reduces the time the user spends on filtering. Remember the goal here is to help the user get to a decision as quickly as possible. You don’t want to overwhelm the user with too many options here, and you want to give the user the right decision-making tools.

Who has the best UX?

Zomato Order’s interaction flow takes the cake here. You can’t see it on the screenshot above, but you can easily minimize the filter screen so you can focus on the next step in the flow — selecting the restaurant. I also like the “quick filters” feature because it really helps the user to decide less. Though it’s designed as a decision facilitator, the filter still requires the user to think what they’re looking for, which is still work for an indecisive user. So a quick filter or recommendation engine is appreciated, in the same way you feel relieved when the waiter recommends what to order at a restaurant IRL.

Bonus: What else could improve the UX?

In the hyper competitive food delivery app world, you’re dealing with ultimately fickle users who get bored with the same food and same apps. Case in point: A quick survey of 10 young startup employees in Bangalore revealed they use at least three food delivery apps in a given week. They’re also down to try a new one for the initial discounts and promo codes. For startups in this space, this means a cash-burning battle to acquire new users. This is dangerous territory for any early-stage company.

Given these challenges with user retention, here’s two UX improvements I’d suggest for TinyOwl, Swiggy, and Zomato Order:

1. Onboarding flow: Food delivery apps fall somewhere in between easy and complicated to use in terms of the user experience. There aren’t a ton of features to “unlock”, but a user still has to go through multiple steps to complete the order (search, select, confirm cart), and more if she doesn’t know what she wants to eat. In a way the onboarding flow is like the first five minutes of walking into a restaurant. A hostess smiles and greets you, hands you a menu, walks you to your table, and then a waiter comes to take your order and answer any questions. It’s nice. As humans we like to feel like someone’s taking care of us. So it can be advantageous to give the user the same kind of experience via the onboarding flow.
2. Social login: For Swiggy and TinyOwl specifically, a social login can help with social virality. Give the users the option to share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram when they make an order. Better yet, give them a discount if they invite a friend or share a post. Social media channels make sense because, well, we’re usually on Facebook / Instagram / Twitter right before lunch.

Right now it’s still anyone’s game in the food delivery startup battlefield in India. Despite so many vying for market dominance, only a few will survive. Just this week, two startups, Daze and SpoonJoy, announced they were scaling down operations as they rethink their core business. Delivering a solid and differentiated user experience is a critical part of survival.

→ If you’ve got alternative opinions, I’d love to hear them in the comments or via Twitter @kmok88.

→ Karen is currently Asia Regional Manager of Seedstars World, an initiative to find, connect, and invest in the top startups in emerging markets. She’s currently traveling to 14 countries in 4 months helping seed-stage startups scale across the region and searching for fellow noodles & naan enthusiasts.