Foodpanda

Introduction

Foodpanda is a food and food item delivery service based in Singapore. It is available both on web and app platforms, and has local competitors providing similar services in the form of Grabfood, and Deliveroo.

With the advent of COVID-19 last year, food delivery services are on the rise. As more food merchants join existing food delivery services or start their own, stiffer competition means service providers will have to go the extra mile to make themselves stand out- as such we decided to take a look at foodpanda to see how it could better shine amongst its competitors.

Between the two platforms, we chose to work on the app version of foodpanda- due to greater prevalence of mobile phones.

Discover

To gain a fundamental understanding of the flow of the app and to identify potential pain points, our team conducted a content audit and heuristic evaluation.

Here are the findings, grouped by Usability Heuristic, with the points reflected in above diagram:

‍Usability Heuristic #1: Visibility of system status
Point 3: Some restaurant menus are lengthy, and a user may miss some of the required parts of the order, forcing him/her to scroll and search for the missed section.

‍Usability Heuristic #2: Match between system and the real world
Point 2: Prices are indicated in unclear “$” signs, leaving the user to guess the price of ordering from that food merchant.

‍Usability Heuristic #3: User control and freedom
Point 5: It is difficult to remove an order once it is added to the cart- there is no clear “Remove Order” button, and the user has to tap on a small “-” icon in order to clear the cart.

‍Usability Heuristic #5: Error prevention
Point 4: In some instances, tapping on a food item in the restaurant menu with the expectation of opening the order details will instantly add it to the cart without and confirmation message.

‍Usability Heuristic #7: Flexibility and efficiency of use:
‍Point 1: Unable to save specific food preferences
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Point 2: The user has to browse by what foodpanda recommends, and is unable to customise their own preferred browsing categories.
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Point 6: There is no option to further refine search options, forcing the user to manually browse the results.

Research

Next, we conducted qualitative interviews, contextual inquiry and surveys on people aged 25–40 years of age, with the intention of discovering pain points within the flow of using the app itself.

Our findings

Using affinity mapping to sort the data, here are our findings:

Our team subsequently cast votes by placing dots on the issues we felt had more weight. The results can be seen above. After voting, we arrived at 3 key Pain Points:

Pain Point #1:
Users take longer than 10 minutes to place an order
With most users taking 10 to 15 mins to place an order- time that often is valuable to the user. We wanted to see if there was a way to cut this time down while not compromising on the user experience.

‍Pain Point #2:
Users wanted the option to customise their homepage
Currently, the foodpanda homepage has limited customisation options- you this leads to greater time spent searching for one’s food preferences.

‍Pain Point #3:
Users felt there was a lack of clarity with the use of dollar signs to denote food provider cost in the search/browse menus.
The use of dollar signs to indicate the relative cost of ordering from certain food providers lacks clarity, and may serve to further confuse Users, or even completely deter them from ordering from that particular provider.

Define

The Problem Statement:

"How might we create a personalised experience for each foodpanda user?"

Personas and Insights learned

We then created two Personas, Gary and Fiona.

From the Gary and Fiona Personas and Customer Journey Maps (CJM), we learnt:

1. The typical customer uses both search and browse functions- hence, we wanted to implement changes that would positively affect users who use either function.

2. Users typically do not have a particular app they favour- one reason for that is the lack of “sticky” factors. By allowing users to customise their own experience within foodpanda, we believe this will not only help them save time, but will create a much needed sense of “stickiness” for users.

Additionally, Fiona represents a subset of foodpanda users who are compulsive browsers, taking their time to look for something that is
just right.

We learnt the reason for this extended browsing was because oftentimes, an order was made on behalf of another person, and so there was some social pressure to find the best possible option for that person. This would also mean that there would be some concern over how the food was handled and delivered.

However, due to the limited nature of our resources, we decided to focus more on the Gary’s pain points, as we felt we could address them better from a UX point of view.

The story

Using Gary as a basis, we developed a storyboard to describe how Gary would interact with the app before and after our proposed changes.

Design Iterations

From our process, we proposed the following solutions to be implemented in the app:

‍Solution #1:
Creating an option for Users to personalise their homepage.

‍Solution #2:
Implement a post search filter to allow Users to further refine their search results.

We had originally thought of replacing the dollar sign symbols to actual numbers, but that led to some concerns regarding readability ($$$ vs $5–10), especially considering small font, and given that the User moving forward would be able to tailor the exact price range he/she was looking for in the customisation options. Thus, we left this idea out until we could further test it.

Conclusion

As the dust clears from the post-COVID lockdowns, it is becoming all too clear that food delivery services are the way forward for F&B providers large and small.

As the market blossoms and more providers join the fray, creating a superior customer experience that appeals to the end-user (pandering to the user) appears to be the way for providers to stand out amongst the jostling sea of competitors.

We hope that these changes will prove to be the defining factor for users who are often comparing food delivery apps.

Thank You

A BIG thank you to the instructors of the SGUS x NTU: UX/UI programme and my fellow course mates for their valuable feedback and guidance. Also not forgetting my teammate, Markus- he was a vital contributor to the work in the this project. See more of his great work here.

Lastly, Thank You- the reader, for taking the time to peruse this article. Please consider following me on medium, or on other platforms. All feedback and criticism is welcome- Looking forward to hearing from you!

Foodpanda

Introduction

The Process
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Discover