How to design for hungry people (The Quatro Story)
I cannot believe anyone took my first designs seriously!
In 2020 I go my first job as an in-house UX designer at Quatro, an online food ordering and delivery platform based in Cotonou Benin. Salim hired me without a UX portfolio or solid experience in product design and put his faith in me and an amazing group young developers to bring the apps to life.
After the first version of the design was done, we decided to make several architectural changes which affected the design thus giving me a second chance to design the entire app from scratch. This time around I didn’t make so many mistakes as the first time. I decided to do a lot more research this time and design to solve for problems instead of aesthetics and Dribbble-worthiness.
I had spent several months re-designing the app only for the entire thing to be ignored by the front-end developer on the project because there was no time to implement my design. We launched version version 1.0 of the app to much fanfare but the design sucked and I knew I needed to fix it but I was too tired to do another redesign.
I spoke to Salim and we agreed to a slow rollout of design changes for individual sections and flows on the app. One of the first ones to receive a redesign was the checkout screen see that case study here
Help Hungry People Find Food
So imagine your user is famished and trying to order ramen from their favorite restaurant, they open your app only to find a message telling telling them that their favorite restaurant is not yet open for the day.
The user will be incredibly disappointed and have to find another way to get food. The user is unsatisfied and the restaurants on your app loses money which means you lose money and potentially a loyal user.
To solve this problem I worked with the dev team to use common tags and categories to create similar Restaurants / Menu items from different restaurants which can be shown to the user as an alternative in order to help them find the food they’re looking for as well as allowing them to pre-order meals if the restaurant is closed for the day.
Encourage Hungry People to Explore
We found that people weren’t exploring the app, they would only go to their favorite sections to find the types of food they wanted and didn’t want to try other things. This was majorly because there was only one way to find categories in the previous design.
We made a data informed decision to return to using bottom navigation like in the first iteration of the design in order to have an easy to access dedicated “Categories” section.
I also proposed we add an eye catching section at the top of the screen which will encourage users to click and explore categories as well as adaptive sections of the homepage which will shuffle food items depending on time of day and what categories or food types the user favors.
These small UI/UX changes continue to help Thousands of Quatro users to find and deliver food they enjoy every day and I am really excited to see what the future hold for the Company. I left Quatro in 2021 to continue my growth at Ylomi, a platform for freelancers and professionals across several fields. ✨
If you have read to this point, I really appreciate your time! I will be writing an article on how to go from Newbie to Senior product designer soon. Follow me on Twitter and Medium to stay in the know. Shoot me an email if you have any questions or want to small talk about design, music or Jesus. 😊🤘🏿
