A food delivery platform for small to midsize restaurants.
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
WHAT
Designing an IOS app for an online food delivery service in the new-delivery tier. The prototype includes main interactions of the restaurant owner and restaurant customer.
WHO
All tasks in this project are completed by me. (Primary and secondary research, sketching, wireframing, designing interfaces, and building the prototype)
HOW
Secondary research of the market, existing IOS based platforms. Primary research with a local restaurant. Sketching, designing with Sketch, InVision for the prototype.
Market
Worldwide, the market for food delivery stands at €83 billion, or 1 percent of the total food market and 4 percent of food sold through restaurants and fast-food chains. It has already matured in most countries, with an overall annual growth rate estimated at just 3.5 percent for the next five years.
By far, the most common form of delivery is the traditional model, in which the consumer places an order with the local pizza parlor or Chinese restaurant (although many other kinds of restaurants, particularly in urban areas, now offer delivery) and waits for the restaurant to bring the food to the door. This traditional category has a 90 percent market share, and most of those orders—almost three-quarters—are still placed by phone.
Two types of online platforms have risen to fill that void. The first type is the “aggregators,” which emerged roughly 15 years ago; the second is the “new delivery” players, which appeared in 2013. Both allow consumers to compare menus, scan and post reviews, and place orders from a variety of restaurants with a single click. The aggregators, which are part of the traditional-delivery category, simply take orders from customers and route them to restaurants, which handle the delivery themselves. In contrast, the new-delivery players build their own logistics networks, providing delivery for restaurants that don’t have their own drivers. [1]
Competition
First, I started looking at the food ordering and delivery market for ideas. Being based in Buenos Aires, I had the chance to look at the traditional tier player, PedidosYa, in addition to the E.U. and U.S. based new delivery platforms.
Design Discovery
I studied some of the most popular iPhone applications in the food delivery and dining industry. Their sign-up flows, forms, information architecture, food discovery experiences, on-map interactions, order flow, changing order details, and empty states were impressive. Gave me a ton of ideas.
User Research
As a part of my user research, I walked over to La Fachada, one of my favorite empanada/pizza restaurants in my neighborhood. They only offer take-out food and deliveries, no on-site dining. La Fachada partners with PedidosYa, the largest online food delivery platform in Latin America. PedidosYa is an aggregator, built on the traditional model for food delivery meaning they are a middle-man providing mostly communications between restaurants and customers. The food is prepared by the restaurant, then delivered by restaurant’s delivery team.
At La Fachada, there’s an employee sitting in front of a desktop computer with large screen all night handling deliveries. I had a quick interview with her and recorded a video while Sol told me how the system works, explaining the pros and cons of the platform. This helped me shape my thoughts around the UX for handling deliveries on our platform.
Interviewing my local pizzeria in Buenos Aires. (In Spanish Language)
Sketching
The strategy and interaction design ideas for Bite were shaping up in my mind.First,I thoughtwe should be handling deliveries in a very sophisticated and efficient manner, similar to Uber handling their inventory and logistics. In Buenos Aires, a vast majority of the food delivered by motorcycles and bikes, so it’s pretty fast to receive the delivery once the restaurant sends it on your way. This was a good sign for me. Our competitive edge should be “delivering food within 30 min.”.
As always, I started with pen and paper to put all the ideas together and organize them. As I put the flow together, new ideas appeared. I got more questions, took notes of those questions, then prioritized what should be researched more, or put in the backburner.
Finally, the requirements for the MVP were determined, and the product strategy based on the above delivery goal, was putting a lot of weight on the use of A.:
Our AI will be handling all logistics including:
- The restaurants and food items offered to customers (based on restaurant & customer location, preparation times, traffic, etc.)
- The delivery person that will be chosen to do the delivery (based on their mode of transportation, location, traffic, etc.)
Design
As always my day-to-day go-to tool Sketch was my main tool for designing the interfaces for Bite.
Prototype
I used InVision to build the prototype for Bite. Craft plugin is very handy if you want to build it on Sketch app, then upload it to your InVision account on the go.
Voilà! Here’s the final prototype including the use cases for:
How a restaurant owner joins the service and lists their menu, what a new order request looks like when it comes in, and how the customer is notified throughout the process from request to delivery.
(For the best experience, check it on a desktop screen)
Enjoy!
Kaan L Caglar 