In a comparison study conducted personally by ordering the same food from the same restaurant on all the above three platforms on the same day and same time (11:30 am on a Thursday), the following are the key areas of comparison and are listed out :

DoorDash:

• Total Cost: $23.89

  • • Menu: $15.85

    • Tax: $1.05

    • Delivery: $2.99

    • Service: $4.00 (includes $1.00 Regulatory Response Fee)

• Delivery Speed: 35 minutes (0.4 miles away)

Uber Eats:

• Total Cost: $21.82

  • • Menu: $14.65

    • Tax: $1.36

    • Delivery: $2.99

    • Service: $2.82

• Delivery Speed: 25 minutes (0.4 miles away)

Grubhub:

• Total Cost: $22.08

  • • Menu: $16.70

    • Tax: $1.38

    • Delivery: $1.49

    • Service: $2.51

• Delivery Speed: 35 minutes (0.4 miles away)

The delivery and service charges on these platforms are dynamic, depending on the time of day (lunch or dinner time), distance, and even the restaurants and tie-ups.

The Ideal Food Delivery App

A good product is a relative truth as it varies from person to person and is contingent primarily on the User. Nevertheless, we can judge a product by its quality that has the following four facets: functionality, reliability, ease of use, and user delight. Human behavior plays a key role in determining a product's fate. Motivating humans to use a product (or a new product) is quite challenging as each human responds differently to the same stimuli, and so is decision-making. Thus, a good product is the only which both keeps the User motivated to use the product and also engaged.

The ideal food delivery app is the one that offers a wide range of cuisine, the best price in the market, quicker delivery times, keeps the User updated at all times about their delivery, addresses customer grievances, and also motivates the User through their loyalty programs. Let us dive into each of the four product design criteria and try to analyze the design of the Uber Eats app in the Redesign section.

Functionality

The core of a food ordering app is the features and functionalities that allow users to complete the task of ordering food. The types of this category are minimum requirements, majority requirements, and nice-to-have features.

The minimum requirements include the basic functionalities such as searching for the desired restaurant, easy navigation through the menu, secure payment, tracking the delivery, talking to the delivery person, and customer service.

The majority requirements are the features that are most likely in demand by the majority of the users as saving the user details, address, and payment methods for future use, user preferences, and the type of cuisine the user is likely to order most of the time, user reviews and feedback, and a recommender that suggests the user try relevant cuisines.

This brings us to the nice-to-have features such as loyalty points to the users, meal plans, and customizing the food.

Reliability

This predominantly includes the "trust" factor concerning secure payment, the quality of food delivered, and safe interaction with the delivery person.

Data Insight: In a 2019 study of top complaints related to food delivery, 17% of the consumers said that their food arrived was not fresh.

Ease of Use

One of the fundamental design principles is the ease of using a product, i.e., the interface must be invisible by design. Conversion rates are typically higher when the user finds the interface easy-to-use that helps them order food seamlessly. A carefully designed product sustains the user's mental model imparting lesser cognitive load and driving more attention toward the task. The user feels empowered when they think that the product was tailor-made just for them which motivates them to engage with the product.

User Delight

Delight can have many forms and numbers depending on the product and is measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitative delight reflects through user behavior like user reviews, loyalty, and referrals. Quantitative delight is the measurement of engagement like orders per day per customer, order value, adoption rate, retention rate, task success rates (like abandoned carts, the time between opening the app and order), NPS scores, and downloads per month.