DoorDash is a San Francisco-based technology company that connects people with a variety of participating restaurants in their neighborhoods. I chose to redesign their mobile app as was passionate about designing a food delivery app as well as suggesting improvements for the existing Doordash app.
I managed all aspects of the project, from the initial user research and ideation to prototyping and user testing.
Duration: 1 month
Tools: Figma, Miro, Maze, Confluence
I created a DoorDash account early one Saturday morning, and after entering my delivery address, I had a quick scan of the Home screen. The first thing I noticed was that all of the restaurants were closed. This made me wonder how hungry breakfast-goers would easily find eateries offering breakfast since there was no option to filter by open restaurants. The overall objective of the redesign was to identify other problem areas and propose solutions to improve the overall app usability.
I began this project by learning more about DoorDash’s target market. In a 2015 interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, CEO Tony Xu described the company’s primary target audience as young families where both parents work full-time. DoorDash strives to bring good to people by giving them time back in their day, and offering them a wide range of choices.
Next, I identified the company’s closest competitors and carried out a competitive analysis in the form of a feature comparison matrix.
Following the analysis, I conducted some desktop research to better understand how users feel about the DoorDash app.
These are the most common pain points I identified:
I surveyed 60 respondents about their usage and perception of food delivery apps. Overall, 30% of respondents reported using food delivery apps once per week in the four weeks before the survey. While 20% said they had been using food delivery apps two to three times per week.
Respondents were also presented with a Likert scale (1 = not at all important to 5 = extremely important) and asked to rate the importance of certain features.
Here are some of the results:
Finally, participants were asked to comment on what they liked most about their preferred food delivery apps. I used an affinity map to organize and sort responses into groups with common themes.
Here are some of the key insights:
Those surveyed were also asked the question, “Are there any key functionalities missing for you from food delivery apps?” The responses to this question revealed that respondents greatly value personalization and customization.
Following my research, I created an empathy map to put myself in the shoes of a food delivery app user, and gain insight into their behaviour and feelings.
The insights I uncovered from both my primary and secondary research allowed me to create a user persona, ‘Jasmine’, on which to base my redesign decisions.
After discovering more about the typical food delivery app user, I put together a user flow to visualize their steps and thought processes.
After crafting my user flow, I devised a number of HMW questions:
Using the HMW questions, I sketched initial designs on paper and used Figma to create mid-fidelity wireframes.
Search Tab
To make the search tab even more discoverable and easily accessible, I placed a search box at the top of the Home screen.
Search Screen
The search box doesn’t make it clear what users can search for. I included a sample search query in the input field so that users know what type of queries can be used.
To help users narrow research results and find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible, I placed a refine icon to the right of the search box on the Home screen. I also added a number of additional sort and filter options.
While tapping on “Pickup” reveals the address, for restaurants that don’t offer pick up, no address is shown. To address this pain point, a map functionality has been added. When the user taps on the hyperlink, their default map app will launch where they’ll be able to see the restaurant’s address.
Order History
Currently, users need to tap on the Orders tab to view their past orders. To emphasise a user’s order history, I included a section titled “Recently ordered from” on the Home screen.
Favourites
Giving users the option to add restaurants to a Favourites list helps them spend less time searching, and is a convenient way for them to create a list of restaurants to try as they discover new ones. Users can favourite a restaurant by simply tapping the heart icon.
Special Instructions
Users either missed or didn’t know how to specify a special request. In an attempt to resolve this pain point, I decided to include the comment field on the same screen to remove the need to switch to another screen.
Shopping Cart
There are two ways to edit the cart:
In my opinion, the long press functionality isn’t very user friendly, as the user has to learn that it exists on their own. To make it easy for users to remove an item from their cart, I have added a cancel icon.
Lastly, to increase the discoverability of the cart, I added a shopping bag icon to the top right corner.
To validate my proposed solutions, I asked three users to perform the following set of tasks using the prototype:
Surprisingly, all users managed to successfully complete four out of the five tasks. Two users had some difficulty with the final task, as they weren’t quite sure what to tap on to see the address. I took their comments into consideration and changed “Open Map” to “See Map”.
Overall, I’m really pleased with how my first UX case study turned out. In particular, I learned how important it is to consider the user in every stage of the design process. I underestimated the amount of time it would take to finish the project, so next time I’ll need to set realistic deadlines. I also would have liked to have conducted more usability tests to see where additional improvements could be made, however, the pandemic made it challenging.
Thanks for taking the time to read my case study! If you have any feedback or would like to get in touch, please feel free to contact me.
