Uber Limit
Giving Delivery Orders Control During Peak Times
Background
Uber Freight is a 3rd party digital platform, helping restaurants reach more customers by offering delivery and pickup.
Challenge
Restaurants’ managers feel they don’t have enough operative control over third-party delivery apps, mainly during peak times, and prefer to shut down the app during this times.
Solution
A new restaurant status was added in addition to the Accept (on) and Pause (off) statuses in the app - Limit.
Entering this status will allow only the 25% most loyal customers in the app to order, reducing the load in the kitchen in peak times while keep using the app.
Research
A semi-structed in-depth interview was conducted, in order to find the motivations, feelings and perspectives of restaurants staff. The interview was conducted with 5 restaurants’ owners and managers.
In addition, observations were made in restaurants to get a better context of the problems and challenges the staff is facing.
Insights
Customers ordering from third-party delivery apps are not top priority for restaurants. Dining in or take away customers have the superiority.
Repeat customers are crucial to restaurants, as 65%-80% of sales comes from them.
70% of mistakes leading to refunds occur during peak times when the kitchen is overwhelmed.
Sketching & Wireframing
Sketches were made to explore implementation possibilities and placements. The chosen solution was then translated to low-fidelity wireframes in order to validate structure before moving on to high-fidelity design.
Design
Base Design System, Uber’s design system, was followed throughout the design to ensure consistency
An accordion docked button was added to let easy access for changing restaurant’s status .
A stepper was chosen as the way to set time durations when restaurants’ status is changed to Limit or Pause.
A segmented control button was created for changing restaurant’s status.
A countdown was added to restaurant’s status button on Limit and Pause statuses.
User Testing
Guerilla testing were conducted to identify usability pain points and to enhance the feature intuitiveness.
Insights & Improvements
Tests showed good efficiency with quick learning curve, but 3 key issues were discovered:
Limit status’s icon affordance - Users had difficulty interpreting the status representation from the icon.
Mode change configuration - Users were unaware that setting a timer is required to update the restaurant’s status.
Changes were made in accordance in order to refine user experience.
Before
After
Impact
The feature’s effects should be:
Decrease in order mistakes - both in the kitchen and in deliveries.
Decrease in usage of Pause mode.
Increase in revenue - for both restaurants and Uber Eats.
