October 2019
Zomato: UX Feedback
UX/UI Case study to the design challenge “Hunt for the best UX feedback” by Zomato
User Experience Design | Company Online Contest Project
Challenge
To analyse and explore the user flow of the Zomato app and look for opportunities for improvement to provide a qualitative feedback.
Objective
• Identify opportunities
• Substantiate design changes
• Identify technical issues
• Highlight UX improvements
My Goals
• Exploring and analysing the application in order to identify opportunities.
• Suggest design changes with valid ground.
• Coming up with a qualitative feedback and conclusion which helps in the improvisation of the application.
• Look into the opportunities to highlight improvements
Understanding Zomato as a Company
I’m a college student staying away from home which has made me an avid/dedicated user of the Zomato app since the past three years and a Zomato gold member since the past year. I have witnessed the application going through UX/UI changes and updates regularly. Zomato’s latest update has been more managed and with well-segregated sections of the data. Zomato is an Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery start up founded in 2008. It was started by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. It provides information and reviews on restaurants, including images of menus where the restaurant does not have its own website and also has food delivery options from partner restaurants in select cities. Zomato is known for providing a user-friendly environment to consumers where they can review, rate, share and search the favourite or nearby restaurant.
My Role in the Study
• User experience designer
• Researcher
• User Interface designer
Usability Test Questionnaire
Task 1:
You’re hungry and too tired to go out at an odd hour of the day. What will you do?
Task 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.
Task 3:
It’s your birthday and you have planned on a dinner party. How do you look for the right place?
Task 4:
You wish to be a Zomato gold member. How will you go about it?
User Research & Feedback
Going forward with a qualitative research, I had 6 participants in the usability testing where i gave them 4 tasks. The tasks included using the app to order food in several ways and looking for a place. The people interviewed belonged to the age group of 19-24. Every user had their own reasons/ways for selecting the place to order or to dine at.
But, there were a few problems experienced by most of the users interviewed.
• All the 6 users avoided using the filter option either because they were unaware of the positioning of the filter feature or had not explored the sorts of segregation ways available in the filters options.
• 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
Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping was used to get a qualitative feedback from the users of the Zomato app. 4 participants were a part of the activity.
In the usability session the users and I brainstormed to find ideas and areas of improvement in the app. Each was noted down in the post-its.
In the next step, I asked the participants to analyse all the ideas and group them. I kept naming the groups while they were working on it. After the naming of broader categories they were asked to place the post-its in a sequence based on priority.
It turned out that the most feedback received was for the Filters on the homepage of the application. We came to the conclusion that the latest update has grouped the information about the place which is accessible at another level through a CTA. The basic information should be as close to the user as possible unlike the interface of the application right now where the user has to go through 4 levels to get the information.
Key quotes from the Users
“I don’t know what to order”
“I’d really like to have more pictures of food, you know I buy what makes my mouth watery”
“I wish they had a way to filter things”
“I don’t like the new update. Going through so many pages just to get the information for the place is exhausting”
Profile of the Users
Sugandh Makwana
22 yrs, Mumbai, Accessory Design student, 4th year
Sugandh stays in the hostel and is an active user of Zomato gold as she prefers going out every second day. She likes to try different cuisines on different days. She is a perfectionist and loves to work with well-managed and organised objects while religiously following her routine. She dislikes adapting to a different approach and has trouble with application updates. Sugandh tries to go for only one way of payment by swiping her card and avoids food delivery due to the same. Sugandh goes to places suggested by her friends as she believes the places turn out to be different as the pictures are usually from good angles. She likes reading quotes and really appreciates the idea of small quotes while the Zomato app loads but sometimes it triggers her anxiety when she’s unable to read the whole quote and she’s unable to find it again. Sugandh avoids calls as much as possible, she dislikes calling the place to ask about basic services or for some requests for dining out.
Pain points
• Trouble finding the reason why the address page was not moving to the next page. Mandatory tag choice not prominent enough to select.
• Trouble judging the place by its pictures
• Avoids calls for special requests related to dine-outs
• Found sponsors information unnecessary
• Due to technical issues needs an alternative to cash or net banking or wallets
• The current tab on the bottom menu bar is not highlighted enough.
Goals
• More visible tag feature
• Augmented experience can be available for few good places
• Chat feature to directly talk to the restaurant related to the future visit.
• Provide information like sponsors in another tab and not on the first page
• Pay by card on delivery available
• Change in the menu bar appearance or the icons in order to give priority to the current tab.
Srishti Kundu
20 yrs, West Bengal, Fashion Communication Design student, 4th year
Srishti lives with two flatmates in an apartment. She either cooks or orders online from Zomato. Srishti has recently added gym to her routine. So, she tries to order from places where she’s able to order healthy and low calorie meals. She finds going through too many options to find one result frustrating especially when dining out. Srishti gets restless very easily and that’s the reason why she goes for meals which have visuals and finds the final partial screen for reviewing order very disturbing. Srishti gets easily annoyed by too many options of food.
Pain points
• Had trouble finding a way to just see the places which provide healthy and low calorie meals.
• Less options for occasion specific suggestions of restaurants.
• Rejects meals she wants to eat if there’s no visual attached
• Too much information on the Zomato homepage
• Going through all the restaurants to find a suitable option is tedious. Is unaware of the filter feature.
• Finds difficulty scrolling on the partial screen of the final order preview page.
• Unavailability of the important information of the place on the first page.
Goals
• Feature using which the app displays all the food outlets for diet conscious people.
• Filters for occasions i.e. date, birthday, business meeting, etc. with the other options of drive-thru and outdoor seating.
• More visuals on the menu
• Less cluttered information on the homepage
• Emphasis on the filter section to help users ease their searches.
• Full screen final; order preview
• Emphasis on the “about the place” button or availability of the information of the restaurant on the first page.
Pain Points
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 included different research methods to find areas of improvement in the Zomato app’s experience and interface. 6 people were interviewed directly and using affinity mapping and usability tests, ideas have been brainstormed and problems detected. Keeping Zomato’s colour scheme and brand image in mind, The case study has suggested minor changes in the positioning and visual element of the features which might bring a better impact on the user experience.