Feature Redesign | Jan - Feb 2021
Role
Product Designer
Type
Passion Project
Team
Peter Pham, Gloriane Yu
As foodies surviving through the peak of a global pandemic, my teammate Gloriane and I relied on food delivery services like DoorDash since eating out was out of the question. However, we noticed that the design lacked accessibility and convenience compared to its competitors and couldn't figure out why one would use DoorDash over other food delivery services.
We challenged ourselves to improve several mobile app features to ensure that DoorDash will maintain a competitive edge in the long run with high-level usability and visual design.
My contributions to the project include UX design, iterations, interaction design, and product strategy. My teammate helped me work on user research, visual design, and usability testing.
Impact
Note: This is a personal project and I am not affiliated with DoorDash. This case study was created as a fun learning experience for me to explore and improve the digital products I enjoy using.
This problem is crucial to solve because if users switch to other food delivery apps, DoorDash's customer base will drastically drop and they will lose to their competition. The chances of users sticking to DoorDash is a coin flip unless we promote an impactful solution.
Kevin, our persona, will break the user problem down into 3 sub-sections:
Kevin considers categories such as "guilty pleasures" insignificant and unrelated to his needs. These categories are also displayed first on the home page, which reduces his search efficiency.
Kevin has several restaurants that he enjoys ordering from, but it's a hassle to search for them every time. DoorDash not having a favorites feature introduces unnecessary friction, increases overall search time, and makes his ordering experience inconvenient.
Kevin often visits the offers page, but can't search for offers that relate to his favorite restaurants. DoorDash only has filters for restaurant searching, which slows down his ordering process.
Kevin receives personalized, relevant category suggestions for restaurants upfront based on past order history. The detailed restaurant cards, personalized categories, and revamped information architecture provide him with better restaurant scannability, reducing app abandonment rate.
Before
After
Kevin can add restaurants to his favorites and access the his personalized list through the favorites tab allows him to quickly find what he needs and spend more time living life. Based on additional research, less than 10% of users actually used the pickup feature since DoorDash was mainly used for its delivery service, so we discarded it.
Before
After
Kevin can access the category filters that are exactly like the home page in the favorites and offers tab. This allows him to search for restaurants and/or hot deals within specific cuisines. We added these necessary filters to provide consistency throughout the app.
Before
After
Who uses food delivery apps? We surveyed 24 participants to learn about who our target users are, what they valued, and how they felt about the current state of food delivery services.
After learning about our target users, we followed up with 10 interviews and learned that users just switch to different apps to find what they want, but it's still notably time-consuming, which leads to a poor user experience.
"I have a 30-minute lunch break for work, but end up spending half my time searching for what to eat. I end up abandoning the app and try to whip up something quick."
"I order delivery because it's convenient for when I don't have a lot of time despite the higher cost. When I do have more time, I switch to other apps until I find a good deal."
We compared DoorDash's current app with its competitors to discover the areas of improvement we need to address. We found that favorites, filters, and navigation were areas where DoorDash struggled the most.
After synthesizing our research findings, we narrowed the scope down to 4 categories using an affinity map. We learned that our target users wanted improvements in these specific areas.
Based on our learnings from research, we discovered that our target users are mainly millennials and created Kevin to represent this demographic.
It was time to apply what we learned into design, so we built and polished up a mid-fidelity prototype to prepare for our usability testing session.
We conducted a moderated usability testing session with 7 users to find design flaws that we might have overlooked.
The participants were able to complete 100% of the tasks, however...
"There's not enough information on the restaurant cards for me to quickly decide on a restaurant only based on the estimated delivery time and delivery fee."
"I keep tapping the restaurant card by accident when I'm trying to add it to my favorites. It's also hard to see where the heart is with the restaurant images behind it."
We studied the user feedback and continued to iterate on our solutions to deliver the final prototype.
Since this project was only conceptual, we didn't have access to actual quantitative data and weren't able to collect actual success metrics. However, these metrics would hypothetically measure the business outcomes for DoorDash.
We thought of some edge cases that were beyond the scope of our project, but had the potential of being implemented.
