How UberEats Is Using Design To Disrupt The Food Delivery Industry
In less than 3 years, UberEats has introduced a new and easy way of ordering food at just the tap of a button and has grown the service to almost 50,000 restaurants in 200 different cities.
A subsidiary of the well-known taxi on demand service Uber, UberEats is a food delivery service that allows customers to order food from their preferred restaurants and then decide where they want it delivered.
UberEats started with a mission to make good eating easy and accessible for everyone in all places, and in a short period of time, they’re well on their way to achieving this.
How did UberEats achieve this milestone, and with the presence of strong competitors like GrubHub, Postmates and Seamless?
Design helped.
- Part of UberEats’ strategy was leveraging design methods, such as ethnographic research to empathize with their customers, and prototyping, to build solutions around their product that were relevant to their customer needs.
Every third month, UberEats’ designers visit a new city, study the city’s food habits, delivery people, customers, and restaurants. They shadow delivery agents while they go on deliveries, and sit in with people in their houses, while they order their meals. As the designers studied all these stakeholders, they took notes of what they observed.
Through this method, UberEats was able to understand if their products were actually addressing customer needs.
- After spending time in the space of customers and other key people, each UberEats designer returns to report the challenges they observed their customers regularly face.
Then a variety of mockups and prototypes are built and taken back to the city to test with customers and stakeholders in real life scenarios. The team then quickly determines which test(s) perform the best.
The best performing test is created and rolled out to the consumers.
How Can You Use This in Your Business?
1. Develop a Pattern of Empathizing with your Customers
Many Nigerian businesses today don’t know what drives their customers to do what they do.
Get into their space, live their life. It has been proven that doing this brings to light details that would otherwise be hidden. Details that when used can radically impact your business for good.
How can you learn from UberEats by investing more time seeing things from your customers perspective?
2. Build a Culture of Testing and Improving
UberEats is known for continually testing, adapting and improving their customer experience. How can your business begin to test critical parts of your products or services with your customers while experimenting to find out what works for them versus what doesn’t?
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