Design Thinking Approach — Food Ordering Solution
People’s dependence on technology has moved them to do everything online; from shopping for items online to getting cooked meal delivered to their houses.
Technology has also contributed to changes in consumer preference.
This is one reason why food vendors have invested heavily in mobile applications for ordering food online.
This case study describes my process for helping company X come up with a solution to help their customers order food online with little or no stress using the design thinking approach.
The Challenge
Company X needs to come up with an innovative solution to help its customers order food online from the comfort of their home.
The Design Thinking Process
Stage 1 — Empathise
To design a solution that customers wanted to order from, we need to set aside our assumptions and personal ideas about how people think and what they want. This will be a good time to learn about how the market works and especially about the customers that will be using our product.
- Data is king
We will request our client’s existing data to enable us to pinpoint our target demographic. This will allow us to learn the identity of our target audience, their pain points, preferences and other details that will aid in generating our target customer.
In the event our client doesn’t have existing data, we will help them create a CRM through step two.
2. Nothing beats User interviews and Testing
We will interview some of our client customers to find out about their pain points in using other food delivery apps, what are the most important things they look out for in a food ordering app and identify the main reason why they prefer our client. This will allow us to get closer to potential customers and have one-on-one discussions about their ordering habits.
Stage 2 — Define
At this stage, we will analyse the observations, gather all the information and identify the salient problems. This stage is where we create a problem statement that will guide us through the rest of the Design Thinking Process.
While keeping the process user-centred, we must also keep our client’s needs in mind. For example, the client might be looking to move customers to immediately start using the application.
Sample Problem Statement — Company X is a first-generation restaurant that has been serving customers from the early 70s. They noticed their patronage has been dwindling due to the more mobile fast-food companies with innovations. They need a solution that will help them keep up with their customer while not reducing their company value and standards.
Stage 3 — Ideate
The team will need to think of ways to come up with a solution (Mobile app/Web app) that will
a. Make the customers trust the product
b. Increase the conversion of first-time users/visitors
c. Incentivize potential customers to place an order
d. Improve their ordering experience based on their pain points from using other apps
e. Increase ordering menu traffic
Stage 4 — Prototype
After identifying the ideas that we want to implement, it is time to create prototypes based on the ideas that we came up with.
During this stage, we will come up with a low fidelity prototype that will be presented to our client for testing and approval. This will allow us to make minimal changes to the overall design if need be.
Stage 5 — Testing
This stage will help us know if the product solved the client’s problems, helps the users make quick decisions and carry out tasks seamlessly.
This stage will give us more insights and possibilities to iterate on our problem solution, prototypes and the final product.
We will carry out our testing in the following ways:
- In-house Testing — we will ask members of the staff of our client to test the product. Although this might not give us accurate data as they might be biased in their opinion having understood the inner workings of the company.
This will allow us to test for small UI-details, gather opinions of the overall design, get some feedback from their experience.
- Out-in-the-field testing — at this stage, we will send the prototypes to some customers using age brackets for two different age grades (18–35; 36–50).
Since they are not familiar with the product and ordering system, this will give us a fresh look at our product.
CONCLUSION
Design Thinking is a faster and cheaper way to include the voice of the consumer into the process.
With our solution, both our client and their customers are winners. We were able to come up with a customer-focused product for our client using the 5 stages of the design thinking approach.
This article is part of my assignment during my UI/UX internship program for https://sidehustle.ng/
