Eden Food Selection Redesign
Edenlife · 2021
My role
Designed the end-to-end experience and collaborated with multiple teams as the project required having touch points on almost every surface on the app.
The Team
I worked as the sole designer on embedded on a squad. 1 product manager, 10 engineers, 1 content designer and numerous teams for collaboration
Overview
Eden is a tech-enabled concierge service that puts your basic home needs on autopilot. The company was created to cater to the basic services required by people regularly. Food, Laundry and Home Cleaning.
Introduction
Food Selection is a crucial part of Eden as a service as at least 80% of Eden customers actively get Food as one of the services rendered to them. Nailing the food selection meant alleviating the pains of a good number of our customers.
Selecting food is something customers have to do every week because of how our menus are designed and rolled out. A new and rotating menu is released every week and as such, customers need to select their food for the week.
Problem
Food selection is cumbersome and difficult. Customers need to select food that they want to be delivered to them from time to time. Normally, they would go about this using a spreadsheet. They would first check the food they want on the spreadsheet before sending their food selection and the days they want to get them to us on Whatsapp.
Goals
The goals for this exercise are split into 3 ends.
Make the food selection process as simple and intuitive as possible for them.
Reduce the number of time customers spends selecting their food.
Embed the meal selection in the app onboarding for new customers.
Solution
To give more context on why creating a simple and intuitive experience for food selection is important, food selection is typically done at two points in the app.
During Onboarding
Every week as long as the customer gets food as a service.
To properly tackle this problem, we had to outline the variables involved when picking food.
Frequency: How often the customer wants their food delivered to them.
Quantity: Number of meals per delivery.
Meal Combinations: The combination of main food items and sides for each customer.
Delivery Days: The days of the week customers want their food delivered.
First Attempt
Our hypothesis was that to make the process of food selection seamless for customers, we should curate recommendations for them based on their allergies and preferences. This meant pre-filling days of the week with food combinations that we assume the customers might be interested in eating by filtering out foods that might trigger their allergies.
When we introduced this, we got some pushback from customers that it was difficult to make changes to the recommendations they got in a case when they didn't want a food that was recommended. We also noticed that customers were straight-up removing meals and adding them on different days simply because they wanted them on a different day from when we recommended them to them.
We also got customers who reacted positively to the recommendation system
Second Attempt
Learning from the first attempt at solving the problem, we took a step back and outlined our learnings. First, we outlined what worked and didn't work from the previous solution and set out to optimise and rectify them respectively. What we came up with was a system that lets customers select their food themselves and also lets us recommend food to them depending on which experience they prefer.
Direct Food Selection Flow
What we resorted to was a flow that allowed customers to select all the food items they want to eat for the week at once irrespective of the day they want to eat each meal. To accomplish this, we created a cart system that is populated as the customer picks meals. A customer can view the cart to review their food selection and duplicate meals where they deem fit.
After the food selection, we automatically assign the food selected by the customers to days of the week. The customer can move food around different days by simply dragging and dropping food from the day they don't want to receive it to the day they want to get it.
We also made it possible for customers to remove meals in cases where they change their minds while selecting the days.
Recommendation Flow
We resolved the issues that came with this system by improving the recommendation system in itself. We also improved the usability by doing the following.
Switching meal days: We made it possible to switch meals from one day to another by implementing a drag and drop feature that made it possible.
Removing and Replacing meals: We switched out the modals for a more extra options and instead went with a swipe interaction on each food combination. Swiping or tapping on the meal.