GOdeals
Explore local cuisines for less with the order-for-pickup cuisine marketplace.
I.OVERVIEW
GOdeals is an early stage, B2B2C startup, aiming to bring together customers and local businesses in today's neighborhoods by partnering with restaurants and sharing their exclusive dine-in and pick-up offerings to the customers on a mobile marketplace.
As the only Designer on the product team, I was deeply involved in not only the design process, but also in design research and working with the CEO & PM to define our business model, key userflows, core functions, identify 3rd party suppliers all of while collaborating with a disciplinary product team.
8 Sprints (6 Months)
1 Designers | 6 Developers | 1 Product Manager
UI/UX Design | User Research | Journey Mapping | Wireframing | Usability Testing | Design System | Design QA
The Challenge: Inflated Prices in Deliveries
This chart is how much it takes to order one meal from a local restaurant using 2 major delivery services (with and without memberships) vs. how much you would pay for walk-in & carry-out. Paying nearly double for the same dish is insane, and for those who order deliveries frequently, the premium adds up quickly.
Provide an affordable & convenient alternative for the food enthusiasts to explore&enjoy cuisines from restaurants around them, but for less.
II.HIGHLIGHTS
Welcome to GOdeals
The order-for-pickup marketplace for those who are looking for a cost-effective alternative to deliveries.
Your Favorite Cravings, All In One Place
GOdeals enables users to place remote orders and have the flexibility to enjoy whenever they prefer by partnering with your local restaurants and bring their menus to your fingertips with little extra cost.
Team Up And Save
Shop & invite others to join group buys to pay less for the same deliciousness. Not only does GOdeals bring the menus to your fingertip, we also enable restaurants to initiate promotional campaigns for your favorite dishes.
Enjoy However You Want
Got tired of the stacking premium for deliveries? Godeals presents an efficient and cost-effective alternative: Stop by and pick it up on your way home, or save the code and redeem it in your next dine-in.
Get Notified
Stay on top of your orders. Get notified when the merchant confirms your orders, when they're ready for pickup, or when you just scored $10 off in a group buy.
Seamless Order Processing
Cut down the processing time with increased accuracy. When you arrive, simply pull up your order and show the QR code to the staff, they'll scan it and see the details right away.
GOdeals for Merchant 🍳 🥘
A restaurants' marketplace can't function without, well, restaurants. So I also designed a mobile-based merchant dashboard to help the owners and/or operators managing their digital storefronts: updating menus, processing remote orders, and performing other routine tasks.
All-in-one Merchant Dashboard
The other side of the mirror. Our answer to the merchants' need for a tool that helps them run a business: Managing orders, updating the menu, starting a promotion campaign, and checking revenue.
Impact
Within the first 6 months after launch:
108
$100k+
92%
32%
II. RESEARCH
Overview
We spent the first 5 weeks conducting desk research and user research for both user groups: Customers & Merchants. There are two main objectives for our research:
1
2
Is there an underdeveloped market gap among the existing, on-demand food services approaches?
Will people fancy the idea of ordering ahead and picking up in person over paying extra for deliveries?
Identifying Business Landscape
Validating hypothesis #1: Is there really a potential market gap for us to thrive?
A Highly Competitive Space
We have witnessed the meal delivery industry's exponential growth throughout mid 2020 until now when many rather stay at home yet want to experience different cuisines the past two years.
With Doordash just went public, and UberEats continue the integration into the Uber ecosystem; companies are not only racing to capture more market shares, but also exploring new growth paths such as premium memberships, and grocery shopping.
A Different Approach
In the midst of the competitions within a saturated market, remote Ordering Service for dine-in and pick-up is a surprisingly open space to be explored.
Our opportunity lies in building a convenient and cost-effective alternative for both the customers who are looking to explore cuisines around them at a reasonable cost, and business owners looking to grow their business and generate more revenue.
Meanwhile, we saw great potential in introducing two business concepts into the food service industry: Group Buying and Mystery Box.
Group Buying has been around in the e-commerce world for a while, however, they are mainly used to sell non-perishable goods.
For us, it presents a perfect opportunity to be utilized by restaurants and grocery businesses, with better flexibility and timeliness in mind, to reach wider audiences by offering affordable products & services at a lower yet still profitable rate.
Mystery Box is an increasingly popular concept nowadays in the age of e-commerce and proven to be a good way to resale surplus merchandises.
In our case, knowing that surplus stock is also a thing for perishable goods, and often times, perfectly fine groceries are ended up thrown away. We want to build a channel and encourage businesses to sell their surplus inventory in the form of Surplus Surprise Boxes, in an effort to reduce food waste.
Business Research: Our Opportunity
With a clear goal in mind, we moved into the desk research. Alongside the CEO & business, we gathered & digest the data from various business statistics to further identify the opportunity space. In the end, we were able to confirm the market gap's existence.
Looking at the Numbers
We turned to business magazines and statistics charts. As it turns out, aside from exponential growth of delivery services and meal-kits throughout the past 2 years, plus the already widespread contactless POS devices in the restaurant businesses, there is hardly any coverages in the world of service providers in remote ordering ordering solutions.
**according to Global News Wire, Expert Market Research, and Ask Wonder**
Within the competitive landscape
To find our ideal business space, we did a competitive analysis for the existing on-demand/fresh food market and identified an almost untouched space to be in: the remote ordering solutions space has very few competitors, and most of them are brand-specific, such as the Starbucks & McDonalds App.
Build A Business Model
In addition to the business research, I also helped in finalizing our Business Model Canvas with the CEO & business. Which would be informing us key needs in both business operation & product infrastructure during the development phase.
User Research: Customers
Validating hypothesis #2: Are there customers out there looking to cut down the cost and don't mind the extra efforts?
With the business scope hypothesis confirmed and out of the way, our next step is to understand our users' needs in their own words. We designed & distributed a survey to gather quantitative user feedbacks, reading app reviews of other delivery services, while I focused on conducting further interviews.
THEMES & INSIGHTS
#1: Cost-effectiveness
Given the right conditions, many would choose to pickup mobile orders in order to reduce cost.
Preference over deliveries vs. pick up is more relevant to one’s schedule instead of the income.
#2: Dine-in & socialize
One does not only choose to dine-in for its food, but also for the right space to hangout and socialize.
When in a dine-in environment, customers are more likely to try out new options.
#3: Discovery
Being present at a location in-person means way better representation for the business than it’s digital storefront.
Some users consider the pick up trip as an opportunity to explore other businesses in the Vicinity.
#4: Encouraging new habits
It is easier to form and adapt to a new routine with the right motivation.
A number of my interviewees started to use the pick-up feature out of curiosity and ended up loving it.
Target User Persona
With the insights in mind, I felt the need for a better, more personified representation for our potential users. Therefore, I created a persona to help myself & the team maintain the focus during the latter brainstorm & design process.
Cyrene / 25 / Software Developer
Needs
Reduce monthly expenses on food while keep exploring the menus from different restaurants.
To take a breather away from screens.
Find more places worthwhile to eat out and hang out with friends.
High-level Goal & Objectives
The product team then moved on to dive deeper and identified a few critical things within our process: Project Timeline & Milestones, Short-term and Long-term Objectives.
Short-term Objectives
Complete the product development & beta test before shifting into production environment.
Pre-operation preps: Marketing contracts, advertisements, promotion offerings, etc.
Onboard a first batch of 20-30 merchants and begin the trial operation.
Review the trial results and get ready for the full-scale launch.
Long-term Objectives
Increase overall app usage (customers and merchant partners).
Expand service to more major cities and areas across the U.S.
Continue to improve different features of the App & internal tools in terms of UI/UX with feedback-driven design.
Build a efficient and competent, in-house engineering team to handle maintenance and future development needs.
IV. DESIGN
Initial Iterations
After wrapping up the product research, It's finally time for some design work. I hosted 2 workshops with the product team, first to brainstorm the core features & a draft information architecture map.
In the second session, I presented 3 potential concepts for the customer app, each with a unique theme, and was able to narrow down to the most feasible direction to pursue within our timeframe & technical constraints.
- Most feasible with the current timeframe & engineering resources
- Conservative but tested, with good scalability
- Top-down scroll format, view promotion/item/stores in lists.
- Physically visit a location to "unlock" various perks after a mobile order.
With a clear direction in mind, I was able to create the comprehensive customer userflow with FigJam, based the draft version generated from the brainstorm. I then ran it through the team to finalize all features & screens before diving into wire-framing. Which include: Onboarding, Registration/Sign-in, Browsing, Searching, Ordering, Redemption, and the User Profile.
On the other hand, knowing that there are two sets of design to complete on a tight schedule, I prioritized tasks and focused on building & delivering the customer-side experience to minimize idling time for engineering. I also used it to inform the design process for the merchant experience.
GOdeals for Customer: A Marketplace Experience
Initiating conversations with Wireframes
With a list of must-have features and user needs on hand, I proceeded to develop a low fidelity, clickable prototype to test out various layouts and userflows with our pilot users.
I designed 4 usability testing tasks, each mapped to explore answers for one or more behavior-related questions, ground rules are set so that all participants are asked to think out loud and voice any feedbacks/concerns that comes up.
TASK 1: New User Onboarding Effectivenes
> The users are briefly introduced to the App's goal, assuming the have downloaded the App based on peer recommendation or App store previews.
> Participants are then asked to start the App, and register themselves as a new user.
My Questions:
1) Is the current new user onboarding slides sufficient in giving the users a good idea on the product's concept?
2) How many would actually take the time to read the contents? Why?
3) Is the registration/sign-in flow intuitive & friction-free?
TASK 2: Navigations & Overall Browsing Experience
> I presented 3 different homepage layouts and asked testers to try out each of them; assuming that they just signed up and is new to the order-for-pickup service.
> All participants are then asked to navigate freely within the App, explore major function such as browsing the marketplace, view order histories and editing personal info.
My Question:
1) Which one of the layouts being tested echoes well in general? Why?
2) What's working well and what's not on other choices? Is it something we can adapt later on?
3) Is the current navigation system sufficient in informing users where to go for a specific task? i.e. browse for recommended items, look for a specific restaurant, browse a list of restaurants based on categories, etc.
4) Multi-device compatibility: does the layouts work across android/iPhones with different screen sizes?
TASK 3: Ordering Experience
> Participants are asked to find a restaurant of his/her choice and place a pickup order and/or purchase a dine-in coupon to be used later.
> On a separate attempt, I asked the participants to place one group-buy order, and find another group-buy to join.
My Question(s):
1) Is the current shopping experience making total sense to the customer?
2) Are there any confusions around recognizing different types of orders during the process?
3) Is the current product detail page providing sufficient information to the users about a certain dish/merchandise? How can it mutate to accommodate for different types of orders (i.e. general/group buy/lucky box)?
4) Did the checkout process provides enough user freedom and options to better accommodate their needs? (i.e. back option, add/delete payment methods, order notes, tipping, etc.)
TASK 4: Redeeming Orders
> In the last task, I asked the participants to walk through the process to redeem an existing order, under both pickup and dine-in setting, to see if there's any friction within the flow (While I'm playing the role of restaurant staff).
My Questions:
1) When redeeming an order (for pickup or dine-in), does the current QR code-driven solution creates any friction in the process?
2) Is the current screens providing the right amount of details to inform the restaurant staff effectively and efficiently during the process?
3) Is the current interaction & business model something the customer would like to use again? (benefits over effort needed for pick-up?)
In addition to some of the major iterations made based on users' feedback, I also used this opportunity to flesh out as much UX details as possible before moving up the fidelity ladder and applying colors and styling choice. Below, I documented additional tweaks & changes to the wireframe during the wire-framing stage.
Evolving towards Higher Fidelity
My next step is to bring the current wireframes to the next level and handoff-ready: Injecting them with visual details to further enhance its user experience and accessibility, and creating informative prototypes & specs for the engineering team.
Drawing inspirations from other Apps on the market, as well as emerging design trends in 2021, I decided to adapt morphism & neumorphism as GOdeals's primary design language.
Below are the almost-final screens (mapped to each major userflows) with changes made based on feedbacks I received while further testing the high-fidelity mockups. I put the product through 2 more rounds of usability tests before finalizing the design and start working on the design system & the merchant's App experience.
The GOdeals Design System
Having to develop pleasant mobile experiences for two distinctive user groups, plus the need to unit everything under the GOdeals brand, has called for a single source of truth so that the product team can refer to freely.
As the only designer in the team, I took on the task to develop the version 1.0 of the GOdeals Design System. Detailing our branding, typography, colors, components, and basic visual aesthetics for future development and iterations.
Outlook & Retrospective
Next Steps (as of 03/2022)
The App was released on both iOS and Android. We are getting ready to scale the product in the next few months. For me, it is a perfect opportunity to gather feedbacks and data from a much wider user group to understand their needs & preferences. Such as:
> What additional features or change to the current feature the users are calling for?
> How much time does the merchant spent on each screen in their daily routine?
> Did the user discover any loopholes?
> Does the order volume reflects customers' preference to use us for pickup or dine-in orders? etc.
The list can go on, and I would love to revisit the design for some core features with newly discovered insights in the future.
Reflections
Among all of my works, this is THE ONE that I'm most proud of. As the only designer in a start-up team, I have wore many hats: product design, graphic design, some PM duty, QA, and even technical document translator. For me, it is a valuable lesson to have in my journey to become an all-around Product Designer. With that said, here are somethings that I have learned:
🗂 Documentation. Documentation! The entire product team are located across 3 timezones, 3 to 12 hours apart, and working with a distributed team is definitely an eye-opening experience. I got to work on my documentation skills, which is essential for minimizing the guess work for the team.
🤝 Build sympathy through design research. Living in a culturally diverse environment gave me access to different cuisines; In addition, I get to learn the struggles and stories and of many business owners over the recent years. The more stories I hear, the more I'm reminded that why I should be building products with positive user experience in mind.
📈 User Experience does not stop at the product level. A product can be all optimized on its interfaces and userflows, however, if the business model isn't well thought-out, the user experience could still be crippled. In my opinion, it's important for designers to be thinking about products or features from a business context as well: How would we prioritize new features? Will an overcomplicated feature negatively impact the user's experience in the long term? One doesn't need to be in the leader's role to take these factors into consideration.
Full case study available
Want to learn more about this project?
Get in touch and I'd happy to share the behind-the-scene stories :)