EAT.
RESEARCH.
SLEEP.
REPEAT.
Nom Noms
Why Nom Noms?
Nomasté.
We observed that due to the changes in daily life from the pandemic, we identified an opportunity for a food ordering app to support users’ needs around ordering. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the restaurant industry hard, stunting person-to-person interactions and circumventing menus, ordering processes, rewards programs, and payments almost exclusively onto websites and apps.
My Role.
Remote control.
In this project, I wrote the persona description for "Powerhouse Polly" conducted a competitor analysis on Noodles & Company, wrote the "Find and Track Rewards" task analysis, facilitated and conducted user testing research analyses and syntheses, and came up with the idea to incorporate Animal Crossing as a mode of gamification in the rewards section in the prototype.
BITE INTO NOM NOMS
Personas.
Developing personas allowed the team to empathize with targeted users and their real world problems with ideal solutions. We conducted research on different types of people who use food ordering apps and why. We decided on three different personas to represent our findings, with a focus on student Tommy (over 60% of people between 18-29 use food apps). Busy fathers need to order easily for picky eaters. College students need access to foods when COVID-19 has impacted dining hours that will propel them through late night study sessions and won't break the bank. A CFO needs to reorder past meals quickly so she can spend more time with her family. Users are people too.
Thrifty, not picky.
Tommy's Stats:
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Undergraduate student with no car
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Lost part-time job from pandemic
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Needs access to quick and easy options
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Needs to use rewards and offers to help him save money
Click image to magnify.
Dad, I'm hungry.
Meet Ben:
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Stay-at-home dad
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Has three young picky kids
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Needs to reorder meals and edit parts of a previous order
Hardworking and healthy.
Introducing Polly:
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Recently-promoted CFO Polly is time-conscious
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Wants access to ASAP delivery
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Needs healthy options
Competitor analysis.
We decided to complete a competitor analysis so we could learn about features that work well in a food ordering app, features that could be improved upon, and features that should not be included in our final design.
Food menu issues.
Noodles & Co.
Grouping
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Difficult to group the images together
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Lack of clear visual delineation between the sections
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Confusing to select the target category.
Pizza Hut.
Negative Space
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More difficult to see all of dessert options due to list design
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Small images
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Not as enticing as Noodles & Co.
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"Add" buttons are a salient red
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Easy to see where to add item
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"Add" buttons are very small
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Contributes to copious amounts of negative space
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All.
Navigation problems.
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None of the apps demonstrated an efficient menu navigation system
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In Noodles & Company and Pizza Hut, the back button is the only way to regain access to the main menu
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Although the navigation bar in Popeyes is omnipresent throughout the ordering process, there isn't a menu button for easy access.
General navigation.
Nom Noms Solution:
Home navigation bar.
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A consistent feature across all three apps is the navigation bar located at the bottom of the screen
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Makes it easy to access different tasks on the home page
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Each of the different apps features a home, deals, and order button
Context analysis.
Do people who have prior experience with food apps interact with them differently than people who don't? What makes individuals use a food app over ordering food over the phone, or in person? Through a context analysis, we determined how to address some of these questions, either through setting a fixed standard such as requiring that customers own a smart phone or through testing people with experience against people who have never ordered from a food app.
Control
Monitor
Evaluate
Task analysis.
Developing a task analysis helped the team break down user flows for ordering food items off of an app. We identified at a granular level what may cause confusion for users and regrouped to discuss how to mitigate some of those potential issues. We selected these specific tasks because they matched the needs of our personas.
Heuristic analysis.
The team wanted to identify usability issues related to Nielsen's usability and user experience heuristics. We chose to measure effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, and forgiveness as objective measures because they assess long-standing usability principles backed by Nielsen & Norman Group's research. For user experience, we chose satisfaction to provide a subjective measure of the app experience because objective and subjective measures may not correlate and we wanted to capture affective figures to fill in any possible gaps in the data. Employing the 5 Nielsen Heuristic principles, as a team we conducted a heuristic analysis on Popeyes, Pizza Hut, and Noodles & Company both by heuristics and by task. For the task-based heuristic analysis we used the task analyses we conducted earlier of adding food to cart, tracking/using rewards, and reordering a passed meal.
Effectiveness.
Does the app do what it's supposed to?
Efficiency.
Can the task(s) be accomplished quickly?
Learnability.
Satisfaction.
Is the app easy to learn?
Forgiveness.
What's the overall impression of the app?
How easy is it to recover from mistakes?
Nielsen Heuristic Insights
The apps were overall effective in accomplishing tasks but could all be more efficiently done.
Noodles & Company is more satisfying to use because it's:
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Colorful and modern
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Offers best rewards platform
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Requires multiple screens for adding food
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Time-consuming
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Contributes to low efficiency score in first heuristic analysis
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Doesn't present an option to edit a previous order
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Forces user to complete a brand new order
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Further dilutes efficiency and satisfaction
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Popeyes
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Difficult to determine how many points were earned from an order
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Low satisfaction score
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Pizza Hut
Task Heuristic Insights
Click below to see more of our process
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Plethora of options for tailoring an order
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Great for a picky eater
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Difficult to get back to initial order
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Easy to get lost in labyrinth of meal customization
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Noodles & Company
Unmoderated remote usability testing.
Google forms demographics information and SUS.
The team wanted to understand if the familiarity with a system elevates user satisfaction as opposed to standardized usability principles (Nielsen's 5). We also wanted to explain why certain apps outperformed other competing apps. The team decided to utilize a remote and unmoderated usability survey because the competitor apps were fully functional and live and we were able to receive, analyze, and synthesize results in a few hours.
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Pre-evaluation: Participants answered demographic questions and responded if they had previous experience with competitor apps.
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Task: Participants were instructed to add a meal, a side dish, and a beverage to the cart.
Participants:
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Convenience sample of 9 participants
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Group 1: Experience ordering with competitor apps - 3 Participants
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Group 2: No experience with those apps - 6 Participants
Equipment/Materials Used:
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Noodles & Company app
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Popeyes app
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Pizza Hut app
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iPhone or Android phone
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Google forms (SUS)
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Computer (optional)
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Google sheets/excel
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R (for statistical analysis)
SUS Raw Score Data Collection
Participants rated the apps similarly to experts' heuristic evaluation.
I conducted a Welch Two Sample t-test due to the unequal variances between the two sample groups through the statistical software programming system R.
I used Google Sheets to display the findings.
SUS (0-100):
Group 1: No experience
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Mean = 74.9
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Standard deviation: 20.25
Group 2: Experience
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Mean = 77.5
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Standard deviation = 14.31
Industry Average: 68
Results.
Outcome: There is no significant difference in usability between experienced users and inexperienced users.
Participants' Perceived Task Completion Rates
Participants’ Feedback on Popeyes:
“Couldn’t find a restaurant near the address after it said it couldn’t deliver to the address, and from there even the map wouldn’t load to find somewhere else. Sad!”
“could not get to check out without creating an account”
“I was not able to get to checkout without making an account, which I did not do.”
“it's annoying that you have to sign up for the awards system in order to place an order”
Insights.
We should rely on Usability Principles as opposed to familiarity with a system to inform design decisions
Effectiveness: Noodles & Company has the highest SUS rating from participants (82.5), also supported by findings from the expert heuristic evaluation
Satisfaction: Checking out items and forcing users to create an account decreases task completion by almost half(!!!!)
Efficiency: Noodles & Company reported the least perceived time spent, followed by Pizza Hut, and then Popeyes
Learnability: Noodles & Company and Pizza Hut reported 100% task completions, indicating higher learnability than Popeyes
Design thinking.
The team decided to do two rounds of design thinking in order to ideate on rewards tracking, coupons, and points system. We came up with some fresh ideas to liven up the current restaurant app process.
Round 1.
We set a timer for 10 minutes over zoom and brainstormed on coupons and rewards.
Coupons and rewards were the most diverse between the three competitor apps we researched and moreover had mixed results in the competitor and heuristic analyses.
Included navigation bar from competitor analysis.
The design thinking process enables creative, out-of- the-box ideation. Ideas fly off the page, no matter if you think the idea will make the final version or if it's just plain silly. We all agreed to not let our pencils stop inventing.
We put in a Rewards Bazaar in the final prototype.
Here is my idea for gamifying the rewards process in Nom Noms.
After discussing and bouncing ideas off each other, we decided to further ideate and refine:
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More ways to be rewarded
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More ways to earn points
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Layouts
Round 1 Insights
Round 2.
Here we go again!
Round 2 Insights
From our second round of brainstorming, we chose several ideas to incorporate into our app, including:
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Visual tracking of points progress
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Challenges with people in the area
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“Coupons” for earning bonus points
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Rewards bazaar for browsing rewards
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Additional rewards systems
Prototype.
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Added a visual points tracker similar to Noodles & Company to increase engagement of Rewards program
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Incorporated order buttons on the home page and additional ways to explore
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Simplified menu categories and made it easier to access menu
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Can change quantity
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Unable to do so in Popeyes until it's in the cart
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Added a dropdown menu to customize food
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Prevents page from getting cluttered
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Adopted Noodles & Company's available rewards and add more items to order
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Added edit and can completely edit order
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Visual tracking of points and progress
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From design thinking we came up with other ways to engage users in rewards process
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Local challenges with people in your area
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Time periods to earn extra points
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Prizes and rewards other than food
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Offer both rewards program for regular users, and offers/coupon for more casual users
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Both groups can benefit from both rewards and offers
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Recommendations.
