Project Kickoff
When challenged to find an opportunity in my everyday life, I looked into the products I use most often. I wish Apple's Podcasts app more closely aligned with my mental model when listening to podcasts, I wish I could navigate Snapchat without getting lost, and I wish Seamless worked better for me and my friends. Each week when my friends come over to watch really intellectual documentaries (okay okay, The Bachelorette), we go through the same annoying process all over again. I text them in a group, letting them know the restaurant I chose. Throughout the day, they text back their orders individually, to not bug everyone else, which I copy and paste into a note. When I'm ready to order, I open the Seamless app and have to toggle back and forth between it and the note, making sure I didn't leave anyone off, hoping I didn't add anything extra. When the order arrives, inevitably with too-few chopsticks and sushi rolls in all the wrong boxes, I calculate the cost per person, divide up the tax and fees, calculate the tip, and toggle between my note and venmo to charge everyone. Actually, I usually am too frustrated from the ordering process to begin the math portion of the evening, so instead procrastinate until my friends have to remind me (they're really good friends). Reliving this process made me realize the problem.
Seamless is great... when you're eating alone
But the moment you have friends over for Game of Thrones (or slightly less respectable shows), ordering food becomes a hassle. In 2015, it was recorded that 26 percent of millennials, who range from 18 to 35, were living with roommates. That, plus the social aspect of television, added with regular weekend activities, means that people are eating together, a lot!
Seamless with your roommate is the new family dinner.
The Problem
Seamless is lacking in a good group ordering experience. While the app is very successful when individuals order food, there are issues in communal ordering and payment once more than once person is hungry.
My Hypothesis
I think that by adding group-order features, such as “multi-user-add” or “split the bill” abilities, more users will decide to head to Seamless for their next group dining event.
Some Assumptions
- People (especially Millennials) often order dinner to eat together
- Seamless and other food ordering services don’t work well for group ordering
- If Seamless allowed multiple users to add to one order at once., people would order more frequently in groups
- If Seamless allowed multiple users to pay separately, people would order more frequently in groups
User research
Interviewing potential users brought up patterns in specific areas, leading to three main personas:
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis of other apps and websites showed that there is no easy way to use your phone to have the a group order food, or a "split the bill" experience, that dining in a restaurant offers.
Objectives and Key results
We'll watch to see if the Dining with Friends feature is successful by measuring specific results:
MVP Plan
The MVP focuses on three main themes to prove value: the owner having the ability to send the cart to friends, the friends being able to join the cart (therefore becoming "contributors"), and both users being able to add items to the same cart at the same time.
Usability Testing
Who
5 millennials
What
A prompt, specific tasks and open-ended questions
Findings
- Participants see use for this feature
- Personal stories of ordering from a distance or charging friends
- Understood they’d be paying for it all
- Shared high interest in being able to connect and charge through venmo, or everyone paying with their own Seamless accounts
Pivot!
Usability testing also showed that, while participants could easily accomplish tasks in a typical sequence, they had trouble navigating to the new feature “out of order.” This led to the first pivot of the project, and relocation of the feature, at least at first release.
Design
MVP User Flow
The Dine with Friends feature is available from both the landing screen (“Restaurants”) as well as in the restaurant menu and Bag screen. Everything in red is the current Seamless experience, and the blue is the new Dining with Friends feature.
Wireframes
Wireframes were linked together in a clickable prototype to get feedback from the users on intuitiveness of the flow, location of actions, and value they see in the new feature.
from the landing page of seamless, the user may invite friends by phone number, or use those recently dined with, to invite them to add to their seamless bag
the user can select which restaurant they want to dine at, which allows contributors to add their food to the creator's seamless bag. from there, the user will see an itemized bill, allowing for simple and easy payback by friends.
MVP Roadmap
Once the value of the group cart is validated, we will work on adding the "split the bill" functionality.
Project details
This project was created during a 1-week intensive General Assembly Product Management course.
February 2018