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Published on 1 October 2019
Zomato’s UX Design Challenge: Simplifying the App for a Better User Experience
Analyze Zomato's user flow, identify key areas for improvement, and provide actionable feedback to enhance the app's overall user experience.
As a college student living away from home, the Zomato app has been my go-to for ordering food and exploring new restaurants for the past three years. Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in Zomato’s “Hunt for the Best UX Feedback,” an online design challenge that allowed me to dive deep into the user experience (UX) of the app and identify areas for improvement.
Objectives
Identify Opportunities: Explore the app to discover areas where the user experience could be improved.
Substantiate Design Changes: Provide valid reasons for suggested design tweaks.
Spot Technical Issues: Highlight any technical glitches that hinder the user experience.
Understanding Zomato
Zomato, a platform for finding and ordering from the best local restaurants. It not only gives you restaurant reviews and menu images but also lets you order food in select cities. With Zomato, you can easily review, rate, and share your favorite spots or discover new ones nearby. As an avid user and Zomato Gold member, I’ve seen the app evolve through various updates, each bringing new features and design changes.
Usability Testing
Going forward with a qualitative research, I had 6 participants in the usability testing where i gave them 4 tasks. The people interviewed belonged to the age group of 19-24. Every user had a different reasoning/criterias for selecting the place to order or to dine at. There were a few common problems experienced by most users.
Use Cases
1. You’re hungry and too tired to go out at an odd hour of the day. What will you do?
2. You and your roommate decide to order dinner. How will you use the Zomato app to order two different cuisines from the same place.
3. It’s your birthday and you have planned on a dinner party. How do you look for the right place?
4. You wish to be a Zomato gold member. How will you go about it?
Insights & feedback
- All the 6 users avoided using filters, they were unaware of the existence of feature.
- 5/6 users were unable to find “About the place” in one glance, they instead scrolled through the page and were frustrated by the presence of 'suggested places' even before the actual information of the restaurant
Next step: Prioritising Feedback through affinity mapping
I conducted and moderated an affinity mapping exercise to organize the feedback. Along with the feedback, the participants and I brainstormed to generate ideas and identify areas for improvement in the app.
Next, I asked the participants to analyze and group the ideas, while I named the categories as they organized the post-its. After grouping, we prioritized the most critical issues. The primary concern was the accessibility of the filter feature on the homepage. Participants agreed that vital information, such as restaurant details, should be more readily available, rather than buried under multiple layers.
Key user quotes
“I don’t know what to order.”
“I’d really like to have more pictures of food, I buy what makes my mouth water”
“I wish they had a way to filter things"
"I don’t like the new update. Doing so much to know the address of the place is exhausting"
Problem 1
The filter feature is really important for the usability flow as it helps cut down on the vast variety of choices available on the Zomato app. Going according to the Miller’s law of the magic number 7, where an average human can just keep around 5-9 items in their memory and anything more makes the experience and the choice difficult for the user. And keeping the Hick’s law in mind too, those many options overwhelm the users and just end up making the user spend more than required time on the application just looking for the same thing. Zomato has the right filters available for their users but the filter feature itself is visible after scrolling on the homepage. It’ll be easier for the users to find it and realise it's presence right when they open the application.
In the feedback I have suggested to position the 'filter' feature on the first screen of the home page and in a separately highlighted section. The filters can further include another option to have “healthy places” for diet conscious people.
Problem 2
Content overload is another problem where Zomato has provided the user too much of information in one single page. The home page and any restaurant’s page have equal amount of information bombarded onto the user’s screen which makes the consumer confused about his/her own choices where they either end up switching to another application or ordering what they weren't craving for. This confusion restricts the user to think about exploring the application where they choose to overlook the “filter” feature which could be of so much help to ease their user flow.
Problem 3
Zomato has main two services, one of which helps the users know about the place they’re looking for. This main piece of information should be the most accessible to the user. Feature of “about the place” for the basic information of the restaurant can be easily skipped while users scroll and look for the information in the lower sections. The presence of “suggested places” even before the actual information of the restaurant is in-sight, frustrates the users more. Their focus goes more on the “order food online” or the “sponsors of the place” than “about the place”. The “sponsors of the place” could be the kind of information for which a user would try to go through one more step and the basic information about the place including menu, location could be right there. Or something similar to the following suggestion could be incorporated.
Problem 4
On the Address details page after placing the order, the user has to choose one of the given tags for their given address. The tags help the user to order using just that particular label for thew address in future. It helps the user to save time by choosing the address in the future orders by just selecting the tag let it be “home”, “work” or “hotel”.
All the input needed is in black while the tags break the flow and have a different colour which instead on getting more emphasis on them, makes the user think it's an unnecessary task which does not need attention. Suggestion to change the colour of the tabs, font to be made similar to “complete address*” and the copy of the task to “Tag the location*” from “Tag this location for later”. Font colour changed to black so as to make it similar to the information right above and let users give it as much importance as address.
Problem 5
It's important for the user to know on which exact part of the application are they exploring at that very moment. Lack of emphasis on the current tab confuses the users on the app while they search for a particular section in the wrong tab. This interrupts the smooth user flow and wastes time. Change of colours and icons in the bottom menu bar could be integrated.
Summarising the Study
The case study employed various research methods to identify areas for improvement in the Zomato app's experience and interface. Six users were interviewed, and through affinity mapping and usability tests, we brainstormed and detected key issues. With Zomato's color scheme and brand image in mind, the study suggests minor adjustments to the positioning and visual elements of features to enhance the overall user experience.
Design Thinking | User Experience Design