Pizza Diavolo App Concept
Ordering customized pizza in under 3 minutes
Student Project
January - February 2022
Role: Research, Ideation, Low-Fi Design and Testing
ABOUT PIZZA DIAVOLO
As my first ever UX project in the context of the 20-week Concordia University UX certificate, I was given the mission to design a set of low-fidelity wireframes for a fictive restaurant, Pizza Diavolo.
Pizza Diavolo is looking to create an application that will allow customers to order customized pizzas efficiently in under 3 minutes.
This was an individual project as the goal was to explore UX methodologies over a 5-week period, with a particular emphasis on research principles.
Creating a mood board early on of the target clientele and pizza place for this fictive scenario helped anchor me in reality and narrow down people in my surroundings I could see fit the target demographic.
THE AUDIENCE
The application is intended for people who are very short on time, such as a parent who is pacifying a hungry child, a businessperson ordering food for an upcoming meeting, someone who got home from work late and wants a quick bite to eat, etc.
SCOPE AND CONSTRAINTS
The project’s biggest constraint revolved around the mission itself, especially when it came to finding the right persona to focus on. Equipped with my screener and carefully crafted user research questionnaire, I was on a mission to find the busy people in my life who liked ordering customized pizza from an app when they are in a hurry. The tasks revealed itself to be quite the challenge as busy people in my surrounding don’t bother customizing pizza or even ordering pizza in the first place if they are in a rush.
THE RESEARCH
After interviewing in a semi-structured way 3 participants and in an informal way an additional 2, I settled on focusing on two scenarios.
I was able to find a participant who recalled ordering customized pizzas in a moment of hurry, the only downfall being – they didn't use an app to do so but a simple phone call! Regardless, it was a perfect case to illustrate what goes into the process of having to customize a pizza in a very short time frame.
The first scenario: Sylvie, a busy working mom, has to order 10 pizzas the day of her son’s birthday, taking into account everyone’s food preferences and restrictions. The journey map that resulted from this interview yielded 3 main insights:
1. Gathering all the specifications (food restrictions and preferences) and finding the appropriate pizzas to start with are the most time consuming steps.
2. When time is limited, starting from pre-existing pizzas saves time. The customization is at the level of adding or subtracting an ingredient.
3. Ordering over the phone is perceived to be more reassuring as they are receiving an instant confirmation. However, the lack of visibility over the order status is a source of stress.
A case for speed: Journey Map of Sylvie ordering over the phone 10 pizzas during her 8-year-old son's birthday party.
On the left, the second persona Maya, a case for customization, ordering 3 customized pizza using an existing app. The Journey Map helped me understand what where the fundamental elements to keep from existing products that facilitate customization and promote app usage.
The second persona I focused on to explore the problem space was the “regular pizza app user” who is ordering customized pizzas for an evening with roommates during finals season. The goal was to identify the fundamentals of customizing a pizza using an app and shortcomings that could slow down the process. The key insights from this persona were:
1.The currents apps don’t allow the users to combine a half of two pre-existing pizzas rapidly. They need to start from scratch.
2. Most users use Uber Eats to order food. However when it comes to pizza, they use the restaurant’s tool as it offers clearer visualization of the ingredients and more comprehensive deals.
3. Deals not only save money but offer a faster process as they guide the customer through a step-by-step flow with a clear price limit. It offers less decision making.
4. The website or the mobile site is most often used. Users prefer a larger screen, and fear buggy apps who need frequent updates. The biggest appeal of mobile applications are saving user information, deals, and tracking.
I conducted a competitive analysis of the main pizza apps mentioned in the user interviews, going through the interfaces myself and reading reviews to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of Pizza Diavolo's competitors. Using Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics for design as a framework, I identified some key elements to keep or improve to ensure users don't waste time due to design fallacies.
I also explored other products that offered customization such as Nike, Nissan, Subway or Dodo case and rated these benchmark products on two axis: ease of customization and rapidity of the overall process.
Using pizza application and other products that offer customization as a benchmark, I identified what worked well and didn't in terms of speed of ordering and ease of customization.
After brainstorming many HMW questions, I reframed the problem as:
How might we allow customers to place an order in under 3 minutes while allowing for customization and confidence in their order accuracy?
THE SOLUTION
Having all this information in hand, I generated solutions with a crazy 8 exercise. I drafted a paper prototype version of my design, that allowed me to do some guerrilla testing before moving on to the low-fi prototyping.
The proposed solution aims to have a similar feel to Uber Eats (cited as the most used delivery app in interviews) for the checkout process to limit the time spent on exploration. Visually, it would follow the “Complexion Reduction” trend for simplicity and familiarity with other well known apps. The solution also includes a very visual representation of the pizza and ingredients as it is one of the main appeals of pizza apps.
Below is a selection of some key ideas of the solution following the journey map stages. As the most time consuming part of the journey was the "Gathering information" and "Choosing the Pizza" stages, the bulk of the solutions envisioned aimed at fast-tracking these steps.
Paper prototyping before moving on to low-fi allow to easily edit and test ideas.
Ask the user to simply enter the postal code to view estimated delivery and opening hours of nearest store, instead of their extensive address information.
Customers can start customizing from menu pizzas (combining or editing ingredients) or their saved pizzas if they are logged in.
Propose to answer 2 quick questions in order to fast-track order/guide recommendations: dietary restrictions and favourite toppings. It is easily skippable if not of interest.
The pizza recommendation/search is now filtered according to the preferences.
Filters are available at the top right at any point.
OUTCOMES AND LESSONS LEARNED
As an introduction to the field, the goal of this exercise was to practice translating research insights into design decisions, which was accomplished. However, the final solution still involved too much decision-making to allow the user to order in under 3 minutes. More user testing is needed in order to narrow down what slows down the process and if users choose to skip the two questions intended to filter their search. In a real life setting, I would also speak with the restaurant staff to understand better what type of customization happens most frequently in order to target that process.
I learned that properly defining the persona to focus on is key in when designing. At first, I wanted the app to appeal to everyone that would potentially use it as I wasn’t clear on the scenarios in which pizza customization happen in a situation of hurry. Overall, it was very insightful in terms of learning what really goes into solving a UX problem and encouraged me to look around in my surrounding to find potential problems and solutions to the products I interact with most, while considering who it is intended for.
