What I’ve learnt designing content for a global rider community
Imagine for a moment you had no boss.
Now imagine for a moment that how you worked revolved entirely around the use of an app. An app you might need to use for at least 15 hours a week, an app that needs to work for you — when you need it to — come rain or shine.
That’s the situation for the hundreds of thousands of Deliveroo riders around the world. This makes designing their user experience exciting — but at the same time pretty scary and important, as riders rely on the service we provide.
It’s been a privilege to be part of the team making the app better each day, and being responsible for the content. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt over the last year about designing content for such a large and engaged audience.
Your audience know your app intimately
Our riders around the globe are constantly using the app. It’s always there so they know it intimately and can often find loopholes to get around the clunkier parts of the journey or find their own shortcuts.
Riders navigate through the app almost subconsciously as they go about their daily deliveries, such is the speed and efficiency of what they do. This means content must be concise, intuitive and not easily missed if it’s important.
As a content designer I have to think about how to use words as sparingly as possible so they don’t create any friction, this means sometimes an image might be more appropriate.
It also means that when we research concepts with riders (for example new features) or run usability testing, what I’m checking is that the key messages really do land and don’t get overlooked completely.
Your audience will notice every little change
There’s no way to ‘sneak’ in changes to the app when we have so many worldwide users! The rider community is strong and they speak to each other about any little changes they notice. It makes A/B testing tricky, as riders compare notes with each other, and if one rider has something that another doesn’t, they’ll quickly let us know via the feedback form we offer in the app!
We research and test changes with riders, to make sure we’re designing usable content and to make sure our changes won’t stop riders from working the way they want to work.
You can guarantee we’ll get a lot of feedback on any small tweak, often it’s good, but not all the time. Which leads me on to…
Not everyone will be a fan of your work
Users get very attached to their UI — we all know how it feels when an app updates to something we’re not used to. When design changes, it feels disorientating. It’s the same when we make content changes.
Usually after a few days of riders experimenting with a new feature or a change, they get used to it and the benefits it brings. But sometimes they’ll tell us in research how they’d redesign or rewrite certain parts of the app if they worked at Deliveroo!
It would be awesome to be able to take everyone’s views onboard and be able to please them all, but at times you have to accept that copy and visual design can be subjective. I aim for copy that’s usable, translatable, and helps someone to complete their task efficiently. If it can also delight users, then that’s the icing on the cake.
Content must work globally
As we have riders in more than 14 different markets, all using the same version of the app, the content I create must be adaptable.
We use translators to ensure the content works in all languages, but there are still some things I do to ensure it’s universal. For example not using very English expressions or puns, keeping to short, standard sentence structures, and checking that the date or time formats work.
Sometimes we get to research in other countries and that’s really helpful. Although listening to a translator all day can be intense, it’s great to hear how the content is perceived in other languages. It’s reassuring to hear when riders understand the message we want them to.
Communicating change should be handled with care
I’m also responsible for communicating changes to riders — we need to explain new features or why we’re making a particular change.
As a general rule, I lead with the reason we’re making the change, so that riders understand why. They’re much more receptive to change if there is transparency around the reason behind it.
This means any email, SMS or tooltip I write has to be clear and simple, and most importantly it has to sound human and offer a clear benefit to riders.
Research can take extra time but drives us forward
When we visit smaller towns to chat to riders, they often have a lot of questions or things they want to tell us before they’ll focus on what we’re testing!
Whether it’s the time it takes them to park, or recommendations for the app, we listen to riders, and take everything down to share back at the office. All this insight is great and can often lead us to making changes in the app.
It’s really rewarding to launch a feature that riders have asked us for in research sessions.
I also note down the words riders use to describe certain parts of the app or their delivery process — this informs my content design later on.
