Food ordering with friends concept — a UX case study

The following case study was created as part of a passion project . I am not in any way affiliated to Seamless or any other companies/individuals mentioned in this article. The design decisions were solely based on the assumptions and information available publicly.

Seamless is a food ordering app, most commonly used by New Yorkers including me. I have used this app for years now and have seen how it has evolved to help its customers in terms of user experience. As much as I enjoy using this app, there is one particular feature that I wish the app had, that is ordering with friends from the same restaurant.

As a UX designer, I took up this as a fun challenge to work on and find a solution that could be a potential feature Seamless can implement or at least can think about.

My Process

Define

Problem

There have been occasions when I have ordered food with my roommates, friends and sometimes coworkers from the same restaurant. So here are a series of problems that this situation leads to

1. Each time, we had to use one single account on one device to see the menu, customize each meal and eventually place an order.
2. Using one account/device means waiting for one person in the group to pick an item from the menu, customize it and add it to the cart.
3. Once the order arrives, figuring out who ordered what since they were all part of one single order.
4. Splitting the bill which means doing the math and sending Venmo requests/adding it on Splitwise app.

Goal

Create a new feature that will retrofit to the existing app and allow a group of users to order food from the same restaurant using their own accounts/devices.

Discovery

Like any UX design process, I started off this project with the discovery phase. I used two basic methods below that would guide me to the right solution.

1. User interviews — Since I identified this problem while ordering food with my friends, they were a perfect sample set of users to start with. This was a challenge we faced as a group. Interviewing this sample set of users gave me a different perspective as each individual had their own concerns with the challenges we collectively face as a group.
2. Contextual Inquiry — This research method allowed me to observe users' behavior and learn more about the usability of the existing app, understand how users interact when in a group Vs. using it alone.

Empathize with users

Empathy mapping

Empathy map to show aggregation of all user interview responses

User Persona

The persona that I draw here is from the existing seamless user base, which is very specific to New York users. Our persona “Emma” is the one that always takes the initiative when ordering food with her friends.

The user persona that will help me understand how the new feature will help the user

Design & Prototyping

Conceptualizing New Screens

The design presented below is the final iteration of many solutions tried and tested.

Since this is a feature that will be used by a group of users, I am assuming Emma(our persona) to be a primary user and her friends to be the secondary users. The primary user will initiate the process by picking a restaurant and should be able to invite secondary users to order food from the same restaurant. This means all the users involved can view the menu on their devices, pick their meal, customize it and add it to the bag. Nobody has to share their phone to see the menu, no waiting until one finishes deciding what to order and customizing it.

Once the order is placed by the primary user, the idea is to split the common charges like taxes, tip and delivery charges(if any) equally along with the individual item cost per person. These calculations should be handled by the app and individual accounts will be charged eventually as opposed to the primary user requesting for Venmo or using any other payment methods.

Secondary users will be notified soon after the order is placed by the primary user. Also, in this step secondary user’s default payment option is used for payment.

Also, this feature will indicate the restaurant to handle the order differently when compared to the regular order. The restaurant will need to label the food with the name of the user and item name so that users will be able to easily identify their food when it arrives.

More scenarios to think about…

As this was a quick and lean UX design, it has a linear flow and there are more complex scenarios to be considered for this concept to be a fully developed feature. Guerilla testing revealed some of those scenarios —

1. Allowing secondary users to invite more users
2. Create groups and save time to avoid sending invites every time
3. A simpler or much easier way to invite users to order together for example through device interaction, sharing a link or usernames
4. Option to add a tip individually for users who would like to give an additional tip
5. Allowing group order discounts, this will encourage more group orders and restaurants can handle food delivery efficiently

Do you wanna try it?

Here is an InVision Prototype for you to try and test it. You can see the primary user(Emma) initiating the ordering process and inviting her friends to order together from one of my favorite restaurants here in Brooklyn.

Thank you for reading this! This is my first article on Medium. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments, It would help me learn and grow as a designer.

And hey Seamless, can we please have this feature? I could really use this for Friday nights with friends!