Group Food Ordering: Helping people order food online in groups
This is my case study for the FamPay Product Design Internship.
The Problem
Let’s understand the problem with a short story.
Imagine you and your friends are finished with your classes for the day and want to order something to eat. All of you start discussing what you guys want to order and after a long 20 mins, you decide where to order from. Everyone goes through the menu and starts putting the things they want in the WhatsApp group.
Your friends ask you to order for them and so you keep on adding the items to your cart.
Once everything is done and it is time to make the payment, the only notification that beeps, says:
“kitna hua vo group pe daal de mai tujhe Paytm/ Gpay kar dunga”. Or “ You make the payment and let me know how much it adds, I will Paytm/ Gpay you the money later.”
My task as a Designer
I had to design a solution to enable the users that are in a group of two or more to order food together and everyone in the group should get a fair chance:
- Of selecting the restaurant they want to order food from.
- Order the dish that the user wishes to eat.
Note: Individual orders will always be more than group orders.
An outline of the Solution
One of the key problems in a group is making a consensus over a decision so to tackle this I introduced a Voting System to select the restaurant which would help take decisions faster & make the entire process fun.
During ordering, a single person became the point of contact for ordering, payment, and tracking of the order. So now people can select the items from the menu and pay for themselves.
Now let’s see how I came up with this solution.
Research
Some chats with friends
I texted my friends asking them about the group food ordering problems to gather their insights and experiences.
I also talked to a few people who use online food services which gave me some amazing insights into the user behavior while ordering food online.
Identifying the problem
On analyzing the problems the users faced while ordering online and in a group, I deduced major pain points of the users that are:
Ideating and exploring User Flows
Introducing some new features
To reduce the friction from the food ordering process in a group I introduced the following features:
User Flows
During the process of making the user flows I figured out there could be 3 types of users:
- Host
- People other than the host who are ordering
- People who join the order late
Let’s look at each one closely:
Let’s Talk Design
Due to a short deadline, I directly went from pen and paper wireframes to final screens. Let me give you a glimpse of the app and then I will walk you through different sections.
1️⃣ The Home Screen
It took me some time to design the Home Screen as it was the first screen user landed on after opening the app and the user would see all the restaurants and the offers here. I had to make sure that it was painless to navigate around and descriptive along with being attractive.
One major issue here was how to put the primary CTA to enable the user to be able to start a New Group Order but after a few iterations, I was able to figure it out.
🤔But why a FAB( floating action button)?
After exploring different positions for the CTA, the bottom right part of the phone worked quite well as it was accessible and comfortable in most situations. Also, the button clearly states the action which anchors the user to know what to do and where to tap to perform an action.
Starting a New Group Order
Once the user starts the group order, they become the host and get the control to choose:
- Who all are invited to the group
- The delivery address
- Restaurants for the voting phase
Let’s look at each section
2️⃣Invitation Screen
Since the app accesses your contact list, it displays all your contacts while inviting people.
Edge case: During a group order, a few of the group members are not available?
Manier times only some of the group members are available and to make a group order it is necessary for all the group members to be present. To solve this I introduced an invite system, so before starting the order you get to invite people. Once the invite is sent, users are prompted with the option to join the group order and have 30secs to accept the invite.
3️⃣Address Selection
While iterating, the problem I faced was with the address selection as the delivery address would not always be that of the host. So a viable solution I found was to let the host select the address of the person where the order needs to be delivered.
Note: The person should be in the group order.
4️⃣Restaurant Selection
In the ordering process, this was the section I spent most of my time on as this was the core part of the solution. I had to go back and forth multiple times through the flows to get this part sorted. The initial flow allowed everyone to select one restaurant that they wanted to nominate for the voting phase but the problem with this was that the nominations being set forth were not eradicating but rather leading to more indecisiveness.
For more clarity let's say that a group of 20 people put forth 20 different nominations for the restaurant they want to order take-out from. This would make the decision-making tough for the users during the voting phase.
So I improvised the flow by allowing the Host to pick a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 5 restaurants that will be presented for voting. This will help to make the decision-making a lot easier for the users.
The data points for the card were also an important thing as they would help the users to make the choice and click on the card. I did a competitive analysis of the data points across different online food ordering platforms and made a list of the ones that were important and need to be included:
- Restaurant’s Name
- Rating & Delivery Time
- Type of food they serve
- Area
5️⃣Voting Phase
This section was a very interesting section to design, here the users get to vote for the restaurant they want to order from. In the initial flow, users were not able to see each other's votes, making it harder for them to decide which restaurant to pick.
Having worked on some Game Design projects where I worked on defining the game mechanics, I applied some of those principles here and decided to let users see who is voting for which restaurant.
6️⃣Menu Section
Finally, once the voting is finished, users can select what they want to order. A thing I missed out on that I realized a little later was
How can a new user join the order now?
So to solve this I introduced an invite option for the host to invite people which would directly add them to the group order and they can place the order. They will skip the voting phase.
7️⃣ Checkout Screen
Once the user continues to the checkout, they get to see their individual bill. They can add order instructions for their order.
Sometimes during checkout, we are not able to make the payment at the moment, keeping this in mind I created an option to let the user ask someone else to pay for them. Under this option, your total amount is transferred to another user.
Once the order is placed successfully, your entire order summary is sent to the group chat and you can directly track your order from the chat section.
Now we are done with the group food order, let’s see the other screens.
Group Chat
Under the group's tab, users can find the previous group order they have been part of and can start a new order from the chat or can track their order.
😅 That’s a Wrap!
Thank you guys for reading, it has been a very educational and fun project for me personally. I really hope y’all enjoyed it as well and also found something useful.
Conclusively, I would also like to thank Arnav Sharma for his invaluable feedback which enriched the project.
