Uber Eats

Fall 2021 — 6 weeks

Skills: Heuristic Analysis, User Research, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping

Teammates: Karan Chowdhary and Austin Poon

Collaborating with two classmates, we were given a task to design and prototype a new feature for an existing app of our choice. This project primarily focused on developing features which will solve a pain point that we discover through research and usage of the existing product — most importantly, meeting the needs of a clearly defined target audience.

Uber Eats company analysis

Uber Eats is a food delivery platform that makes getting your favorite local restaurants as easy as requesting a ride. Uber Eats app connects the users with new local restaurants and food, so they can order from the full menus of their local favorites whenever you want.

Functional Job Aspects

• To make ordering food and supplies for delivery or pickup quick and easy

Related Emotional/Personal/Social Job Aspects

• To manage personalized food recommendations

• To keep track of order status and sharing Uber Eats Riders’ location

• To save the user’s favorite restaurants and their go-to menus

IDEATION

As a group, we have explored multiple directions to improve user experience to find new restaurants and menus from their neighbors. The list has been created from research, interviews, and learnings collectively. Here are few directions that we have discussed:

1. More curated and organized content for browse section

2. User Generated Content - Users can submit dish photos/reviews

3. More detailed reviews/rating system beyond (0.0 - 5.0 stars)

4. Clearer labelling of dietary restriction dish options

5. Showing the number of available riders throughout the day

6. Ability to simultaneously order from multiple restaurants - combined payment rather than multiple orders

Design Opportunity

Key insights:

What really stood out across ten user interviews was that when it came to ordering food, Uber Eats users were immediately greeted with familiar restaurants and menus. They were not fully utilizing or seeing value in the existing “Browse” section. 

Our team wanted to explore different ideas to improve the “Browse” section so users can easily discover new restaurants as Uber Eats’ main job story describes.

Problem:

The list of categories are extensively long and too segmented which makes it difficult for users to discover or try new local restaurants.

Possible solutions:

1. More personalized “Home” section with content based on past orders

2. Dedicated “Browse” section with more curated and organized content to discover new local restaurants

3. Shorten and simplify the long list of categories

CONCEPT 2 ( link to Concept 2 prototype )

• Changed the name from “Browse” to “Explore” 

• “Landing Page” contains more personalized list - Your past order, Your rewards

• “Explore” displays list of recommendation to introduce restaurants’ stories

Additional features:

• Shortened and organized categories into two: Cuisines and Dishes

• Curated list of restaurants and menus from food bloggers

• Added “Can’t Decide What to Eat” feature to help users to discover new restaurants and menus when they are indecisive

• Added “map” for users to see nearby restaurants; this may allow users to easily toggle between “delivery” and “pick up”

USABILITY TESTING

About 87% of interviewees preferred CONCEPT 2.

The reasoning behind this was the clear separation between personalized list and recommended list. The interviewees believed that this will help when they are having a hard time deciding what to order. Here are some feedbacks that we have received:

1. Displaying an icon or any type of indication for the menus that food bloggers have recommended. This can be served as a reminder in the later steps of ordering.

2. Ability to see a list of nearby restaurants depending on the location because few of our interviewees order food based on delivery time. This has been added on to the new map feature.

3. Clearly show how we have reorganized the list and how these changes will make it easier for users to discover new restaurants as we significantly cut down the list of categories.

1. Shortened and organized list of food categories

I have conducted content audit to find a way to organize long list of categories from the existing Browse page. As a team, we decided to divide the list into two - based on cuisines and dishes.

Instead of having blocks, we believed that having a list in alphabetical order would be easier for users to find particular cuisine in a more efficient way.

2. Clear separation between “Home” and “Explore”

Initially, we considered combining the Home and Explore pages to create more simplified experience for the users. With such merge, we thought users will get access to what they need more easily and quickly. However, our usability tests revealed that merging the two felt the app was giving too much information which led to being extremely cluttered and disorganized.

Users preferred keeping the two separates with the Homepage dedicated to personalized content based on past orders and rewards while the Explore page showed more curated content to introduce new local restaurants to users.

3. Addition of map feature

We added a new map feature for delivery service in order to display the fastest route and nearby restaurant that the users may not have discovered yet.

4. Stories about the restaurants from the owners, the locals and influencers

To improve user’s experience in discovering new local restaurants, we implemented two unique features. One is having to collaborate with influencers to provide their favorite local restaurants and dishes. 

Additionally, we have thought sharing stories about local restaurants - black owned, long-standing, or even newly opened. We believed that sharing personal stories about them would develop more meaningful connection with users rather than selecting restaurants based on their menus, proximity or other factors that have stopped them from discovering new places.

In each of these descriptive and detailed articles, the users can learn about the restaurants and quickly navigate to order food. 

5. ‘Can’t Decide What to Eat?’ Questionnaire

Users often felt overwhelmed when they were given with too much information at once.

We added a new feature where users can answer few questions about their food and delivery preferences. Users will then be provided with a curated list of restaurants based on their answers.

Reflection and next steps

I enjoyed working and balancing design capabilities with my partners when designing end-to-end. We learned a lot about the importance of pinpointing the scale of our design intervention early on. Because we started with a deep hang out to understand and define a space of improvement, we have discovered many features that could be more beneficial when they co-exist — enabling users to “follow” food bloggers. Due to time constraints and the demographics of our user research, we decided to focus on improving Browse section.

If I were to do this differently, I would:

• Do a deeper content audit to create more minimized yet informative list of categories to enhance user experience when locating what the users would like to eat.

• Prototype and user test to different age group to observe whether such additional feature is valuable in terms of time for older adults.

• Prototype and user test to answer how can the search bar and food suggestions can be improved.