Food Delivery App Masterclass

 

In this Food Delivery Masterclass, we look into 3 of the leading food delivery apps in Canada. We cover the onboarding, discovery, ordering, and delivery experience and make notes on how they could improve their user experience through experimentation.

Kate:

I just wanted to highlight a few things to set the stage for why we’re focusing on delivery apps today. The new year is already well underway and it comes as no surprise that the food delivery industry is growing faster than ever with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. 2020 obviously saw a huge customer behavior shift in expectations because we’re evolving in an unprecedented race due to the COVID crisis.

As you can see, these driving businesses are in the spotlight given the situation and stay-at-home orders today. In December Doordash made a public market debut with one of the biggest IPO’s of 2020. Uber acquired Postmates at the end of November in an attempt to consolidate market share boost profitability.

We see a lot of activity within the industry and the sales are skyrocketing with no anticipation of slowing down. In terms of how apps are fragmented within the U.S. delivery market, apps remain fragmented and are localized by city, country, and region. This means that testing and understanding the different user preferences at a city, region, and province level. Different targeted areas are increasingly important because users by city and region have different brand preferences, restaurant preferences, cuisines, and different delivery patterns.

Testing and optimizing for specific locales is essential in creating great end-to-end delivery experiences. It’s really cool to see that customers are not loyal to one service or app. So even though I’m a devout Uber Eats orderer, there are a lot of people who bounce in between different, delivery services.

There’s less loyalty amongst all the players today and the battle for customers is getting more and more intense because no one is loyal. So all the services that I saw looking at the stats today, have a lower percentage of exclusive customers and than they did two years ago.

So, how does this impact and what does this mean for food delivery apps? Well, it’s really important to nail that end-to-end delivery experience for customers in order to increase retention and increased purchase frequency, because we’re fighting for a percentage of ever users and diners weekly or biweekly, percentage of orders. It’s really a time to focus on building brand affinity, equity, and loyal users for the longterm. So back to Will to reveal who we’re going to be reviewing today.

Will:

In terms of who we’re reviewing here’s the big curtain reveal. We’re gonna be talking about Skip the Dishes, which is owned by Just Eats International, Uber Eats, and Doordash.

Obviously, this isn’t every single food delivery app within the world. We’re just focusing on these three, which represent the handful of incumbents in this space that are available to us in Canada. In terms of scope and evaluation criteria, I’ll pass the baton over to Kate.

Kate:

Our evaluation was in the context of basically a simplified user journey for food delivery and a user journey map is a really great way to visually represent the customer experience from end to end.

This is a practice that’s helpful across all verticals to understand and address different customer needs and pain points and areas for potential optimization and improvement. We broke it down into six main steps; onboarding, discovery, menu, selection, checkout, delivery, and post-purchase. Bolded below them are the goals that we identified for each step along that journey and then below that, are some examples of the factors that contribute, to achieve that goal and improving overall user experience, proof of delivery.

Will:

All right, first up in terms of reviewing, I’ll be handling Uber Eats. This is from the perspective of a net-new user. Over here, I went to the Google Play Store to download the app.

This covers everything from the account creation which is pretty straightforward, all the way detailing how it was able to guide me through that onboarding flow. In terms of the different ways to create an account, it was great to see different social sign-in options over here, in order to reduce sign-up friction.

But it’s also interesting to note that they don’t have Facebook as a social sign-in option. So, it kind of raised my eyebrow there. In terms of the overall onboarding experience, I feel Uber Eats has struck a fine balance between asking for just enough information to get started with as we’re presented with the restaurant discovery UI. However, I feel there is a missed opportunity here in terms of having users share what foods they enjoy first before being shown that main restaurant discovery, UI.  Just in order to help that new user be presented with some recommended restaurants or dishes or cuisines that might help them decide on what to ultimately order in an easier fashion for that first experience.

In terms of the restaurant discovery over here, it was cool to see that there were lots of helpful tools, tips, and notifications that help educate and highlight the next options to help guide me as a user to that “aha” moment in terms of adding that first dish from a restaurant to my order.

Given that this is my first experience there without any sort of prior knowledge of my tastes and preferences Uber Eats does a great job of highlighting popular and trending restaurants and cuisines that I might like as well as offering an easy and intuitive search functionality, as well as giving me a more granular ability to search for specific dishes that I might be interested in for that first experience.

In terms of Uber Eats add to cart experience I thought this was quite clear and easy to follow in terms of the restaurant detail page here. I usually eat with my eyes when I’m looking at photos so it was great to see all these delicious-looking photos on the Gusto 101 restaurant detail page here.

There are also lots of, add-on’s and upsell options to allow me to add a little bit more pizzaz to that first meal that I’m ordering, as well as having clear calls to actions on how to instruct the delivery person, for how to receive my delivery. One of the things that I noticed that they didn’t really have was providing an avenue in terms of more detailed customer reviews from within the Uber Eats experience.

Over here you can see, there’s a rating of 4.6. While that is some indication of how good it is, it would be nice if Uber Eats integrated with other platforms like Google reviews in order to help me figure out based on the reviews certain restaurants or dishes to help me determine what I’d actually like to order at the end of the day.

In terms of Uber Eats checkout flow, I thought this was a great experience where they offered a clear itemized breakdown of costs and fees in order to help the end-user understanding what the final bill might look like. There are also some other things that I liked that they had were CTA’s highlighting the benefits of some other options like their Uber Eats pass here where I was saw I can save $2.99 on an order if I sign up for their Uber Eats pass. This added some sort of incentive to try out other parts of the product. In addition to that, they also do a great job in terms of setting a clear expectation of how long delivery will take and usually the delivery is much sooner rather than what they estimate. In terms of delivery status, they provide real-time updates where the driver is in relation to you along with pushing notifications at every step of the way.

It was also nice to see that they also had an option to see who’s delivering my meal as opposed to something like a nameless delivery person. It adds a nice human touch to the experience, as well as having, options to communicate and call the driver directly in case any sorts of hiccups in the way, and vice versa for the driver to communicate with me as well as you can see, through the correspondence and some of the screenshots over here.

In terms of the post-delivery experience and how they tackle life cycle marketing. You’re able to do this through both push notifications and email. I feel that this is an important part of that post-delivery experience, as well if you were to drive awareness of any sorts of new offers as well as detailing new features like being able to deliver groceries through Uber as well. In order to help even considerably build trust with a customer as well as helping build that feedback loop in helping customers build the habit of actually using the app time and time again.

However, one of the things that I noticed was that there wasn’t an opportunity to leave feedback or reviews upon actually receiving my items. It was just a weird omission, but other than that, another thing that I really enjoyed was some of their push notifications here.

Obviously, even though I am a new customer, I would advise it to anyone who would be enticed by some new deals whereupon clicking this push notification it actually led me to the offers page, as opposed to going to the homepage and having me dig for that. Next up is Doordash and I’ll hand it over to Kate.

Kate:

Cool, thanks. So my first app that I had to review was Doordash. The first step was onboarding. So right upon downloading and opening the app, it prompts you to get started and create an account.

There’s obviously a skip option, which is stated at the top but its kind of hidden for the user so they are going to follow the typical account creation. I really love that there are social sign-up and sign-in options. It significantly decreases the friction in terms of account setup, which is awesome.

Then right after I did a social sign-in, it prompted me to insert or type in my address. The cool thing that I wanted to point is it led to app delivery instructions upfront. By doing this upfront and at the beginning of the process, it actually down the funnel when you’re going to checkout increases efficiency and saves time that I might’ve spent during the actual ordering and checkout flow, which I liked.

Onto actual restaurant discovery. I really enjoyed the overall Doordash experience in terms of the easy filters and guided discovery at the top. I could browse easily by cuisine as well as other filters like rating, and things like that and just scroll through and be able to select and see a curated list.

Offers also took up a lot of real estate on this landing page as well. Highlighted promotions and deals and special offers for me, I feel like we’re probably put there and placed higher above the fold for me as a new user. Potentially because I’m coming in from another app and they want to show you all the money you can save by selecting Doordash.

I think that was a cool and tailored experience for the homepage as well as when I clicked over to the pickup page, I really enjoyed that the view was as a map. Showing restaurant distance in relation to you gives you a good sense of how far I’m going to have to walk or drive, to pick up my food, which I thought was great.

Next, the add-to-cart experience. As Will mentioned, I definitely eat with my eyes first and I’m a big fan of pictures. In terms of actual restaurant pictures, and specific menu items as well, which Chick-fil-A had both of. I also liked that there are optional and required selection options for when you’re going down and tailoring your menu item for yourself.

As well as there’s an area for special requests. So for example, I added something around changing half unsweetened iced tea vs. sweetened, but it’s a great place to put in a potential allergy notification for the restaurant and things like that. That whole process was really streamlined and I liked it a lot.

One thing I wanted to actually point out around restaurant discovery was I actually inputted two different addresses. The first one on the left is our office address, and then on the right that’s blurred out is my own address. I was actually served two different types of homepages, which I thought was pretty cool and pretty interesting as to why. Thinking about why I was served an offers main promotion versus looking at restaurants who are now delivering alcohol. It could have been because my address was on the left-hand side, an office address and the right-hand side was an apartment.

It got me thinking about different ways that Doordash is automatically tailoring the homepage for me, depending on the address I’m at. Not even because they don’t have any previous data about my purchasing behavior this is a really cool way that I saw them immediately tailor a homepage depending on where my delivery address was.

Once I selected my Chick-fil-A sandwich meal it took me to check out and what I really liked was there’s an easy way to add more items if I wanted to, and the easy way to navigate back to the main menu, through that add more items button. As well, there are really personalized recommendations and upsell opportunities.

From both an app standpoint and a user standpoint, I love personalized recommendations because potentially I could have thought. Hey, I didn’t realize I kind of want a cookie, but now I want to cookie and I’m going to add it and increase my cart value, but also increase my pleasure by ordering this kind of meal.

I thought that was great. A cool thing I also wanted to point out is looking at experimenting between tipping percentage or dollar amount. As you can see in Doordash, it was by dollar amount versus a percentage, and the default tipping amount was $4, which was interesting.

This is a great opportunity for all food delivery apps, to be able to test around because certain types of users might respond better or worse to different types of tipping percentages and those default amounts. After I purchased my meal, there are two purchase prompts that came up after I submitted my order. So the first one was actually a review prompt, which I thought was kind of relevant. That’s why I put relevant-ish permission prompt because I understand what they’re trying to do.

I just went through an entire ordering flow and they want to see how that experience was and create an easy way for me to submit a review. On the other hand, I haven’t finished the entire delivery flow, so I thought it would be a better timed and more accurate representation of how my experience was with the app if it was prompted to me at the end of actually receiving my food.

The next one which I really liked was the notification permission prompt which I think was very well timed in terms of I want to turn on my notifications to be able to track the progress of a meal and see what status it’s at on its way to come to me.

I thought that was great timing on their part for that prompt. Next is the delivery status of my actual order. They sent me really relevant communication via push notifications which I liked and I thought it was a really good way to track your progress versus having the app open and tracking in real-time.

Then at the end, once I completed my order, it showed you that timeline that was completed. One thing I really wanted to call out here is there’s a big missed opportunity in terms of promoting a review. So after I usually completing the order, I’ll hop back in the app and then I’ll go through like reading my restaurant, the food itself, as well as my delivery person.

I think they’re just missing out on a lot of data collection and opportunities to figure out what they could improve on in terms of the restaurant and also gives the restaurant feedback as well. So, that’s one thing I wanted to call out that Doordash could’ve done better, but overall, a really great experience.

Moving on to Skip the Dishes. I was lucky and I got an order two meals or items this week. Right upon opening the app it was a non-gated discovery flow, which means that I didn’t have to create an account upfront in order to start looking in browsing through experiments or browsing to restaurants, which is great.

I think there’s a lot of different apps that like to experiment around gated or non-gated discovery. I think that is a really cool way to figure out what your customers like to do in terms of blocking them at the beginning or having them sign up at the end. It’s a great experiment to test with all different types of verticals.

When I was actually trying to select a restaurant, I clicked on new on Skip the Dishes and what it actually guided me to was a weird curated view of search results, which I didn’t really like. As I said before, maybe I’m biased, but I’m a very visual orderer.

I like to see the pictures of the restaurants and things like that, which it did not give me. When I navigated to the search page, it did have those pre-populated search options or suggested searches, which I did like.  I decided on a bubble tea and what I liked and what was lacking in Uber Eats and what Will touched upon was actually seeing how those reviews are populated. So I was curious, I clicked on the little review rating at the top right-hand corner, and it actually showed me how those reviews were populated, which I appreciated as a customer. I think it’s really important because reviews are a big way across both ordering food, but also all e-commerce apps, reviews of shoes, clothing, all that kind of stuff is how a lot of consumers are making decisions. So being able to understand where those ratings are coming from is super important as a consumer.

I also liked once I clicked in Chatime because it has an extensive menu, I liked that it selected the top 10 menu items at the restaurant. Once I selected my oat milk bubble tea it actually prompted me to create my account at this point. That’s a super atypical kind of flow that we usually see within delivery apps.

What I didn’t like about this was there was no social sign and option. I actually had to fill out those three extra fields in order to complete and finish my order, but after I did so it did, give me that relevant push prompt, which I thought was great.

Onto the actual checkout piece. Once I opted into those push prompts and actually could purchase, this was the flow. I really liked it because one, the tipping point was at the top, which I liked. It was tipping by amount, similar to Doordash which I thought was interesting.

They also opted for the dollar amount, which I thought was cool and probably they tested around. The one thing that I wanted to call out that I thought was a standout difference in terms of the checkout process for Uber Eats and DoorDash was it defaulted to Apple Pay. By putting Apple Pay as a default payment method, it actually reduces and takes away a step from the user to actually choose which payment option that they want, which I thought was easy to do.

I ended up just paying with Apple Pay as well like I did for Doordash. Unfortunately my first Skip the Dishes experience was not ideal just because I know it’s not Skip the Dishes fault. This always happens and I’m definitely an edge case, but my order was canceled and so because of that, I was refunded in Skip credits versus actually doing a cashback refund, which I know is common with Uber Eats and I’m not really sure about DoorDash, but I’m pretty sure it gives you back, money back. I thought this was an interesting choice. I understand from a business point of view, that they are encouraging people to come back to finish and redeem the remaining balance of the Skip credits that they have spent. However, from a user point of view, I’m going to be coming back not as an eager, excited customer, but a reluctant customer who still has money left on the account because I didn’t get that money back at the beginning.

One cool thing that it did look like in terms of the checkout round two, was it looked like I was getting my bubble tea for free because I had spent more on the original order, which I thought was a cool kind of mind game and shifted my perspective of I may be getting this free, but in actuality, I had purchased it before.

Once I ordered that the delivery was really smooth. My order was confirmed, I could track the progress of my order along in real-time, as well as I could swipe through at the top of the screen, the different steps that were completed in order to get my bubble tea to me.

After I got bubble tea what I did like in contrast to the two apps before was they did have a post-delivery review flow, which is awesome. I’m a big fan of filling out quick reviews so, that was great. The one thing I would like to improve on was that it was only a quick, very simple review option, a thumbs up or thumbs down.

I think there’s an opportunity for Skip the Dishes to test around potentially adding a few other quick click options around food quality, packaging quality, things like that to help enrich that review data both for the users, for restaurants and Skip the Dishes themselves, just to collect more data points and make it easier for the users.

I would recommend them to test around that and infuse more robust ways to collect review data, but I liked that there was an availability to chat with support immediately after my review so if there were any problems that did arise, I can have access to an agent.

I’ll give it back to Will to kick it off with Uber Eats.

Will:

So here are the final report cards for each of the apps. I’m going to give Uber Eats a 9 out of 10. I’m going to start off with the bad. I felt as if they could have provided a lot more context within the discovery experience by pulling in something like Google reviews or some other review platform where possible in order to help me decide what I ultimately like to order. All in all, when you take into consideration the flawless checkout experience and intuitive restaurant discovery, I felt as if Uber Eats had merits that 9 out of 10 score and they also set the standard in terms of the delivery time experience. Especially since they’re leveraging a lot of that technology from the Uber platform itself.

Kate:

Doordash, had a similar kind of rating, obviously because I really enjoyed the discovery and searchability of restaurants and the number of pictures I was a big fan of because it allowed me to browse easily through the restaurants, but also the menu items so I knew what I was going to be eating. As I said earlier, big missed opportunity with providing feedback and reviews because that’s a big way that I choose restaurants even within franchises like Chick-fil-A for example, different franchises could have different reviews. So I’m gonna be making my choice as a diner, based on those. I wish there was an opportunity for me to give feedback and I think Doordash would have also appreciated that data, but overall 9 out of 10 experience from end-to-end.

Skip the Dishes. I’m so sorry, I had to rate it a 6 out of 10, just because of the mishap with my canceled order and the Skip credits, but there are also some issues with actually finding a restaurant. I thought searchability there’s definitely areas to improve. Making it a little bit more visually appealing and easy to read would have been awesome. Overall, the actual delivery experience, once I got my bubble tea, was great, so 6 out of 10.

So final takeaways. What I wanted to get out of this whole exercise was to identify that there are so many different opportunities to test at every step and point in the user journey and it leads into the second point of mine. First of all, it’s such a great way to understand what your users actually like and what performs best.

Even though you might be testing major onboarding flows and more robust tests, I think all product teams should benefit and never underestimate the small UX and UI tweaks that you guys can do. One example from a client most recently, an e-commerce client was they also are very focused on reviews and review completion, and they made a really simple UI change to a form layout. It actually increased form completion and review completion by over 10%, which down the road will definitely translate into more sales and more traffic going to those different items. So never understand underestimate the small UX and UI tweaks because that does impact the overall user experience.

Will:

In terms of the final takeaways I have to contribute. The first one is actually leveraging push notifications and email effectively. A keyword here is effectively. It’s not just enough to send push notifications and emails to stay top of mind and remain relevant. It has to be contextual to the stage of where the customer is in their life cycle.

Leveraging both email and push notifications simultaneously is really important to drive engagement and retention down the line in terms of, getting users to come back and continue to use the app in terms of building that habit of using your food delivery app.

Next up is investing in machine learning, as you know, just basic table stakes now. Upon doing a bit of research, every single one of these companies we have reviewed, whether it’s Skip the Dishes, Uber Eats, and Doordash, have poured a ton of money in terms of building up their engineering teams, around building machine learning algorithms in order to power the recommendations, logistics and operations, as well as messaging and delivery time. Putting some sort of effort into machine learning is table stakes and it’s one of the things that you should really take into consideration, within the space.