Napita

Food Delivery Platform
Role
Product Design :
User Research, Storyboarding,
Low - High Fidelity Wireframes, Testing, Prototyping & Animation
Goal
Reimagine first design concepts into a digital booking and ordering platform
Timeline
May - June 2020
Impact
"He went beyond the brief, and the deliverables were top quality, meeting our demands and offering a new perspective on our product. James appeared as a natural leader. I am convinced he is a team player and will be a great asset to any team. I hope I'll be able to work with him again in the future."
Guillaume Cribier (Founder, Napita)
Reflection Summary
Creating a site for food delivery is a simple idea, this is what made it difficult. The simple and easy design required detailed research to understand the exact needs of the users.

We found that users who were given too many options, had trouble deciding and would retreat to places they know. On the other end, users who didn’t have enough choice would get frustrated and want to leave the app altogether.
Overview
With Covid-19 lockdown keeping people at home Napita recognised that people were not eating out and therefore adapted to provide a wider service for delivery or collection of food.​

This project was to create a mobile responsive website that would take users from inspiration to booking a restaurant or ordering food for delivery/pick up.
Quantitative Research

Before Covid-19:

After the initial client meeting and brief, we sent out a screener questionnaire to get quantitative data about the dining process along with how users have been affected since the Covid-19 restrictions. We found:
Users prioritised good quality, atmosphere & service.
‍60% said word of mouth was how they discovered restaurants.
‍46% ate out 1-3 times a month.
‍40% never had food delivered.
Qualitative Research (Interviews)
15 users were interviewed. They were chosen by the frequency they visit restaurants or have food delivered. Users all had an explicit interest in food.
We noticed that users are uncomfortable calling themselves "foodies".
We also found that users often returned to the same restaurant instead of trying new places.
Competitor Research
The concept covered the journey from inspiration to booking in one platform. We identified three main types of competitors:

1. Discovery

2. Booking

3. Delivery

After a detailed look at 23 competitors, we compiled our research on common trends across categories.
Persona
From the insights gathered in the interviews, we created our persona, Tommy.
Storyboard
He thinks to reach out to friends he knows that share his taste in food. But doesn’t remember exactly what friend it was who knows his area well.
Tommy wants to order takeaway but doesn’t know from where. He is craving Italian but finds that so many sites seem too similar. They don’t offer a curated selection of the level of restaurants he’s interested in.
He recently started using Napita and that helps him find and keep track of the places he’s been to or wants to visit. It has a reliable source of reviews from people that share similar tastes.
He visits the site and checks his previous selections. He decides he wants to try a new Italian restaurant, so he refine selects the cuisine, the budget and location filter to help him narrow down his search.
He finds one that looks interesting and has a lot of reviews from people he knows. He decides to go to this place.
He loved the meal so much that he wants to save it for the future. When he returns to the site he adds it to his favourites to keep track of what his friends say about it.
Design Studio - Remote
We arranged with our client for a 3-hour zoom call where we could generate ideas in a constructive way. I was the facilitator of the event and chose to use the “Crazy Eights” technique.

I set 1-minute intervals, and everyone involved sketched 8 solutions, 1 per minute.
‍
I have found this worked well by avoiding too much detail on the sketches. With key stakeholders taking part it was necessary to be strict with timings. A bonus was that the client loved it as he felt involved in the process.

Our main focus was on the discovery process. There were two statements, followed by important information to think about.

“How might we give users information about where to go?”

“How do we display the information that users need in the best way”

We voted for the best ones, everyone voted twice and then we iterated based on those two suggestions. There were 3 iterations for the first statement and two for the second statement. Yellow post-its indicate the most selected ideas.
User Flow
At this point, we had some great ideas so I wanted to map out how this experience would come to life in the user flow below.
Initial Wireframes
We wanted to prioritise collaboration in a remote world so created our low-fidelity wireframes on Miro. This allowed us to collaborate and ideate more efficiently.

We found in research that the app needed to be image-focused to keep cognitive strain low.

Testing
We relied on the heavy use of imagery. Due to placeholder images, some users found it was confusing. They were not associating the image with the corresponding category.

The filters could only be accessed by first selecting “Dine-in, Takeaway, or Delivery”. This added an unnecessary step for the user.

Our mystery wheel was split onto the second page where users could then include a specific filter. Users did not like the additional step. They wanted an immediate recommendation. If they had got to the filters, they said that they would continue on to the list of restaurants instead.
We added mood and cuisine categories. This was to allow users to have more choices for inspiration.

Filters became a pop up, which gave the users the option to refine their search.

The mystery wheel moved to a more prominent place on the homepage. This peaked more interest from users and we found 90% of them clicked it.

The filters moved back onto a refining page. Users were not using the filters and due to it being an important part of the journey with gave it more prominence.

We added a budget for the mystery wheel. This gave users a more tailored suggestion based on how much they wanted to spend.

Adjusted the language for dine-in takeaway and delivery. Users were getting confused with dine-in, thinking that it was dining at home.
Prototyping & Animation
Using Principle, I added some basic motion. This was to show not only the client but to give the developers an idea of how it could look moving through the pages.
Difficulties
Although the idea of creating a site for food delivery is a simple idea, this is what made it difficult. The simple and easy design required detailed research to understand the exact needs of the users.

We found that users who were given too many options, had trouble deciding and would retreat to places they know. On the other end, users who didn’t have enough choice would get frustrated and want to leave the app altogether.

During the design studio, we had an idea of a “Napita community”. A feed where you could see the places other people had eaten or where they had reviewed. Due to the time constraints, we could not build that into this version of the site.
Next Steps
Due to the time constraints we did not get to explore the connectivity between the Napita blog and the platform. Going forward I would want to explore the user journeys from the discovery phase to delivery.

Further work could be done on the Idea of a Napita feed (an idea from the design studio).
Software used: Sketch, Adobe Suite, Miro, Keynote, Principle
Reflection
It was great to work with a client to achieve not only the goals of the user but also the goals of the client. I was nervous at first, but the client was great and understood the value of user-centred design.

"He went beyond the brief, and the deliverables were top quality, meeting our demands and offering a new perspective on our product. James appeared as a natural leader. I am convinced he is a team player and will be a great asset to any team. I hope I'll be able to work with him again in the future."
Guillaume Cribier (Founder, Napita)
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