Sidecar

Donuts on demand.

Ordering donuts just got a lot easier! The new Sidecar app is the most convenient way to order ahead for pickup or delivery. There’s no need to call our stores to place an order and bring your wallet when picking up. Now you can order ahead of time and prepay by using the app. Most importantly, you now have the option on the app to have your order delivered to your door.

My Role

Experience Design, Interface Design, Wireframes, Research, Usability Tests, Prototype

The Challenge

The original app was not as functional to use in comparison to other food delivery apps. According to Jakob’s Law, users prefer apps that work the same way as all the other apps they already use. It is important to have user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than learn how to use something new. The challenge I took on was to simplify the steps for ordering, as well as make it feel and look similar to other popular food delivery apps.

Prime Goals

• Redesign the order process to be more intuitive and exciting
• Minimize the effort to completing the main objective for the users
• Fix typography issues and improve visual elements & interactive components
• Decrease the chances of a user’s ability to navigate away from placing an order

Research and Testing

I conducted user interviews by reaching out to 3 participants who regularly use food delivery apps, such as Doordash, Grubhub and Postmates. I wanted to explore opportunities or gaps in competitive apps by understanding user triggers, likes and frustrations. After the interviews were completed, I had the participants perform a couple tasks on the original app to help myself understand their behaviors and made them write down comments afterwards.
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By utilizing the comments made by the participants, I started analyzing the problems that were encountered and searched for solutions. After understanding the problems more, I mapped out potential user flows to get the experience right. Once the flows felt efficient, I created low-fidelity to progress the user experience and information architecture into a prototype. The prototype was sent to the participants and were asked to perform tasks. Once the tasks were completed, they were told to write down comments or concerns to help uncover and fix usability flaws.

Key Insights from Participants
• Too many taps were required when changing the amount of donuts desired
• Text lacked readability due to text being too small with tight leading
• Some buttons need enlarging and more color contrast
• Users were asked to select the order type (Delivery or Pickup) twice

Obstacles

The most difficult problem I encountered was finding a way to design and organize the food section in order to make it aesthetically pleasing and functional. I made sure to give enough blank space in between texts and elements in order to provide better aesthetics and experience.

Sidecar's Makeover

After redesigning the ordering process with great thought and effort, I had the participants use the app once again in order to determine the functionality. The best accomplishment was that it took them less effort and time to complete their order.
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The most valuable lesson I learned from working on this project was that an aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in users' brains and leads them to believe that the design actually works better and more enjoyable to use.