Delivery Pal Restaurant Gateway

UI, UX & Research

Overview

Food & beverage franchise soared in China in recent years, and with Corona's hit on the economy, a lot of independent workers choose to open a virtual restaurant, or to join a franchise with low entry fee starting around $8000. On the other hand, runner-ups want to grow and become thousand-store franchise. As a result, Delivery Pal is born as a mobile gateway on Wechat, for franchise, restaurant owners, and marketing and design freelancers.

My Role

I collaborated with boss on redesigning the UI, UX & Research.

My Process

1. Understand product logic and dissect user needs by talking to boss and marketing colleague and looking through prototypes
2. Experience existing virtual restaurant business platforms
3. Watch how marketing colleague help clients grow business
4. Synthesize findings into the redesign

User

• Virtual restaurants, although cheap to start, usually fail within two weeks due to their reliance on online traffic and a lack of dine-in option.
• When it comes to hiring marketing freelancers, restaurant owners usually lack understanding of how marketing work and cannot build long-term collaboration with freelancers.
• On the other hand, freelancer's work ethic becomes hindered, and the market goes worse.
• Some choose to join a franchise or to restart at a new location.
• Only those who are more attuned to marketing and cooking perform well.

Goal

• Showcase franchise
• Collect restaurant's information when user use revenue calculator, such as location and sales, and sell to franchise
• Collect franchise joining fee and provide 30-day refund warranty
• Offer marketing & design service marketplace

Product Evaluation

1. Business core, 30-day-refund warranty was hard to read.
2. Genre, price and location tabs did not exist or were hidden, which could be imployed for easy access.
3. Bottom tab bar did not contain top-level sections and went out of context when browsing.
4. Prototype did not use real data, which was hard to see problems.
5. Brand showcase on home screen lacked store photo and sales information, which could be difficult to compare.
6. Waterfall brand browsing might be overwhelming for those users who have not yet considered switching brands.
7. Branding was similar to market norm and was difficult to establish trust.

Walk-a-Mile

1. Existing virtual restaurant platforms overwhelm user with marketing courses, talent pool, and data visualizations.
2. Colleague constantly have difficulty building trust with clients.
3. Restaurant owners want to improve food quality and the making process but lack the resources.
4. New types of food gains instant popularity.
5. Photography tab may not be needed during current stage, as most colleague use photos from the Internet.

User-Driven vs Business Practicality

1. While presenting brand's sales data on home screen would benefit user to choose and compare, boss was concerned about user not tab into detail page.
2. Even though boss supported the redesign, he was concerned that the new design would require back-end to change completely and persisted on launching the previous version first.
3. Team did not have experience with figma or online file collaboration and lacked communication.

Home Selected Before

Home Selected After

¥0 Entry Before

¥0 Entry After

Selected Franchise Detail Page Before

Selected Franchise Detail Page After

Reflection

• The redesign integrated cost and revenue calculation feature into the system and reduced user’s psychological barrier to share location information.
• The new interface is easier to read and establishes trust.
• Research finding about the need for location-specific cooking manual will serve as a potential direction for future iterations.