Jumia Food— A redesign of the user experience when ordering multiple meals at a time
Disclaimer: I do not have access to Jumia’s customer data so this is in no way a comprehensive case study :)
Overview of the company
Jumia Food is an online service that offers deliveries from various restaurants within your vicinity. These restaurants range from popular fast foods, such as Chicken Republic, to Bukas*, such as Olaiya Foods.
The Problem
Some months ago, I made an order on Jumia Food which got mixed up. I had ordered a few wraps of Amala with Ewedu for myself and Amala, Ewedu with Gbegiri for my housemate.
However, both meals were delivered as one meal (that is, in one wrap/plate) because there was no way to distinguish the meals on the app.
When we complained to customer care, we were told to always leave an Order note stating the items of each meal in the manner displayed below. It goes without saying that this method is inconvenient and gives an unpleasant shopping experience, especially when one is ordering a significant amount of food.
To solve this problem, I decided to do the following:
- Switch up the order page to make it more efficient when ordering multiple meals at once.
- Make slight changes to other sections of the app to improve the general user experience.
My Process
To confirm I wasn’t the only one affected by this problem, I decided to carry out guerrilla research with 5 participants. During the interview, I presented my participants with this question:
It’s 3 pm and you are working from home with your housemate, walk me through how you’d order xyz meal for the both of you.
Here, I made them ‘order’ from a buka styled restaurant, a fast food and a restaurant they were not familiar with. I did this to understand how they interact with the interface when ordering from different types of restaurants.
Observations
From the interviews, I made the following observations:
- The meaning of the unlabelled icons [on the home page] are vague.
- Every participant couldn’t immediately figure out why the ‘place order’ button on the checkout page was inactive. This includes those who had used the app in the past.
- The search button was hard to find.
- ‘N0’ which is used when items are free of charge was confusing to some participants.
- The items displayed under ‘special offers’ had no price deductions.
- Everyone was confused about how to add an additional meal for their housemate.
Finally, I realised the current UI sort of works when ordering multiple meals from fast foods but doesn’t work for bukas. This is because items from fast foods are expected to be packed individually e.g If you order 3 meat pies and 2 coleslaws, they will be packed in individual packages. Ergo, your meals won’t get mixed up.
However, items from bukas are usually packed together e.g if you order rice, beans and beef, your items will be packed in one plate. Hence the problem at hand.
User Personas
After figuring out some of the issues buyers face, I created the following personas to guide me as I designed solutions.
Redesign
Home Page — Before
Home Page — After
Single Vendor Page — Before
Single Vendor — After
Order Page — Before
Order Page — After
Checkout Page — Before
Checkout Page — After
Conclusion
This project is my first case study and it took me longer than expected to complete. However, it helped me learn how to plan my time and I had fun working on it.
Also, I was unable to validate my designs due to time constraints but I will be revisiting that in the future.
Thanks for making it to the end. Please leave some claps if you enjoyed it :)
