Nom Noms

You have a consumer goods and services app that needs a fresh design and competitive features.

Having a design researcher helps ensure the product is intuitive, modern, and engaging.

Want it delivered in a rush?

Goals: Identify how competitor fast food and fast casual apps design their apps and what features can we develop to compete with their offerings.
Client: Sample (client redacted)
Method: Personas, Competitive analysis, Context Analysis, Task Analysis, Surveys
Duration: 4 weeks
Participants: 9
Recruitment: Convenience sampling
Tools: Miro, Figma, MS Office

Background

The application intends to improve the experience of customers ordering food from a local slider burgers restaurant in a way similar and competitive to other food apps customers may use. The application is a sample application [the actual product redacted].

I conducted a competitive analysis and prototyping initiative to improve the design of the slider burgers restaurant.

The competitive analysis and prototyping initiative was conducted to answer these questions:

How are fast food and fast casual restaurants designing their applications and online ordering systems?
What are the preferences of users of these apps?
What unique features can we add our application to make our application more exciting and competitive?

Personas

Who’s hungry?

I looked into who are users of this local restaurant app to create personas and persona factors.

Personas are fictional sample users used to represent a real user.

Persona factors are variables about that influence users to behave differently than others.

Persona Development

There were three personas in the form of organizations:

A Student looking for quicky, tasty, filling grub that is inexpensive and premade as they have limited cooking options (and perhaps acumen).
A Parent looking to quickly and effectively feed their family as they navigate their daily schedules.
A Lunchtime worker looking for fast service that they can pre-order and return to the office or a quick bite to pick up after work to beat traffic.

Persona Factors

Some persona factors include:

Order and pick-up time effects a user such as a lunchtime worker’s willingness to use

Order complexity needs to be clean and intuitive such as for parents of large families that need to including many items and customizations
Pricing and discount displays can help users save money and incentive app use such as a student with limited funds looking to get the best for their buck
Technical acumen can influence if a user will complete an order and return to the application such as a grandparent having a hard time navigating the app to feed their grandchildren

Competitive analysis

Some menu options

I looked at how fast food and fast casual apps are displayed their offerings. I wanted to provide a variant between the three apps:

Pizza Hut: delivery focused pizza app, pizza being a commonly shared food offering with topping selections
Popeyes: pick-up and drive-thru focused fried chicken restaurant app with its meals offered individual as well as family platter sets and limited personalized setting but increased side dishes
Noodles & Company: pick-up and increasingly popular delivery (via external food delivery apps) noodles and pasta fast casual restaurant app with its primarily personal menu options and reasonable adjustments of toppings

I analyzed the apps by pages

Launch & Sign-In
Homepage
Offers (recommended & deals)
Rewards & earnings
Food selection (main items)
Food selection (customizing)
Food selection (ala carte items)

For each page, I observed heuristics

Intuitive flow of the page
Minimalism and aesthetic of the page
Error handling and responsiveness

I provided an overall rating for each page:

Green check = generally good
Yellow = minor heuristic issues
Red X = major heuristic issues

< Noodles & Company - Offers & Rewards >

< Noodles & Company - Food Selection Pages >

Context analysis

Narrowing down some desired items.

I determined what factors are important to test, control and monitor. The factors included

Language skills
Physical and cognitive capabilities
Hardware and software access
Experience with similar products
Input device skills
Attitude and motivation
Experience with the apps
Knowledge of the restaurant menus

Task analysis

How would ordering look?

I broke down how hungry customers would use fast-food apps using task analyses. The user goals I examined were:

Add a new food to cart
- Explore menu
- Find a meal
Find and track rewards
- View deals of the day
- Select Rewards tracker
Edit and reorder a previous meal
- Navigate to past order
- Add item to cart
- Edit order

Additional selection rules are displayed to distinguish and choose between methods noted in the top right corner in below task analysis images

Survey of Competitor Apps

Time for a taste test.

I surveyed potential users to see how they felt about the apps. We used convenience sampling to find 9 participants (students at a local university representing the Student persona. I used SurveyMonkey to build the survey.

The survey asked students to

Identify if they have used the Noodle & Company, Pizza Hut, and/or Popeyes apps before
Use the app to add a meal, a side dish, and a beverage to the cart and check out to the point before paying
Determine the apps usability (System Usability Scale)
Rate the apps use and order time
Express their overall satisfaction and other thoughts of the three apps

Survey data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. A Welch Two Sample t-test was also used to account for the variance of usability between the experience group and the no experience group.

Satisfaction

Noodles & Company

100% of participants we able to learn how to use the app and complete the task

“I found it difficult to see all the options then choose and then move to other smaller items.”

“I found the error messages upon adding items to the cart annoying - each time I added something it said that it was under $15.00 - one error message upon trying to place the order that was under that amount would have sufficed.”

“The drink choices were fairly broad, but seem like that leaves a lot of room for errors I'm the customers drink order.”

“App was easy to navigate.”

“Easy, probably one of the most intuitive and easy apps to use for ordering food that I have used.”

“Easy to use”

Pizza Hut

100% of participants we able to learn how to use the app and complete the task

“I wanted to check out didn’t realize i needed to go to the cart to do that”

“I found the drink options for 20 oz and 2 L confusing - why not just small, medium, large”

“This app did not seem as colorful/picture heavy as other food ordering apps that I have used.”

“App was a bit slower to move to the next step after making a selection”

“Slow to load”

“This app was a little less intuitive than noodles and company. Some of the buttons seemed too small or I didn't necessarily know where to click sometimes. Loading was slower than I expected”

The food has arrived! (Results)

Experience using apps

Three participants that used at least one of the apps before
Six participants never used any of the apps

System Usability Scale

*Industry Average: 68 of 100
No experience group: Mean = 74.9 of 100
Experience group: Mean = 77.5 of 100

Welch Two Sample t-test: There is no significant difference in usability between experienced users and inexperienced users.

Use and order time

Noodles & Company: 78% of participants believed the time it took to complete all tasks on average was appropriate and expected
Pizza Hut: 56% of participants believed the time it took to complete all tasks on average was appropriate and expected
Popeyes: 44% of participants believed the time it took to complete all tasks on average was appropriate and expected

Popeyes

56% of participants we able to learn how to use the app and complete the task

“I am not familiar with popeyes food so I had to learn more and then learn a new navigation system. they are all different”

“it's annoying that you have to sign up for the awards system in order to place an order”

“Seems tedious to get back to the menu page if you wanted to add a second item.”

“App includes too many pop-ups”

“Couldn’t find a restaurant near the address after it said it couldn’t deliver to the address, and from there even the map wouldn’t load to find somewhere else. Sad!”

“could not get to check out without creating an account”

“Easy UI to use, not very attractive color wise or design wise though. It was kind of unpleasant to look at. Buttons were big which was nice and it was nice that I could add sides directly on the add a main dish page.”

“I was not able to get to checkout without making an account, which I did not do.”

Conclusion

Delivered.

There were a few notable things that I was able to provide the local restaurant of immediate improvements to their app:

Make navigation to ordering and reordering more clear
Allow users to view the menu even when the restaurant is closed
Make users create an account after they build their orders and before checkout
Improve upon rewards and discount design
As delivery improves, having stronger delivery observability and expanded delivery areas

These insights were used to begin the process of prototyping the UI for the revised local slider burgers restaurant.