Quickie Delivery App: Adding Features
Streamlining customer communications and adding user-requested features for a formerly operational college delivery app.
Role
UX/UI Designer/Researcher. Essentially the entire project from research to final usability testing.
Group Size
Just me!
Duration
Nov 2024 – Dec 2024 (about 1 month)
Type
Club Project
Process
Stage 1. Conducting Research
I began the project with explorative qualitative research, focusing on interviewing any former Quickie drivers I could find as well as former users of the app.
Who?
Quickie users (student customers and drivers)
How?
One-on-one interviews, both remote and in person
How many?
5 Quickie customers
2 Quickie drivers
My initial goal was to figure out what worked and didn't work about the app based on user experiences. Some of the insights I uncovered during interviews were expected, while others brought up concerns I hadn't even thought of.
Interviews
There were some quotes from interviews that really stuck with me.
“I felt a bit in the dark not knowing when my food would arrive. I just didn’t want anyone to steal it but I also didn’t want to wait in the cold.”
– JN, Quickie user
“I can’t have dairy, but Quickie has stuff I can eat. I’ve seen their dairy-free ice creams and popsicles and frozen meals, but everything’s in different categories which makes it hard for me to browse.”
– DW, Quickie user
“It happened really often, when I would have to call a customer to say I’m outside with their stuff and nobody picks up the phone because it’s an unknown number.
So many people don’t pick up the phone for random numbers nowadays.”
– CQ, Quickie delivery driver
“Sometimes I would hear the wind in the background when I called my driver because I wasn’t sure when my order would get there.
I felt like I was putting them in danger by making that call.”
– LP, Quickie user
Stage 2. Defining the Problem
As I narrowed down the insights from my qualitative research data, I realized that the problems faced by students and delivery drivers were not the same, but similar enough that they would not require drastically different approaches to address later on in the design process.
Students
Cal Poly students loved Quickie, but often ran into issues when browsing through product categories in search of something specific and communicating with their delivery driver.
Drivers
Delivery drivers faced similar issues in terms of communicating with customers. Often, they were unable to reach customers through a phone call, and found it distracting to be managing both customer communication and driving their scooter or bicycle.
Left: Inspecting the Quickie promotional website's CSS to find the font and font weight of header text. Right: Low-fidelity prototypes of the primary four app screens.
Research Takeaways
It became immediately apparent what people liked most about the app.
Everyone liked the "feel" and design of the Quickie brand
The pricing, delivery time, and opening hours of Quickie were unbeatable
The process of placing an order and receiving it was intuitive
I also saw some main points for improvement echoed across interviews.
Students wanted to filter their search by price, allergen, category, etc
Students and drivers both expressed a desire for a real-time order tracker
Drivers expressed dissatisfaction with the communication options available
Stage 3. Reconstructing and Prototyping
Reconstructing the Design System: Analyzed the Internet Archive's snapshots of Quickie's promotional website. This website used the same design language as the app, so I inspected the HTML and CSS to find details like branding colors, fonts and font weights, and other design details.
Low-Fidelity Prototyping: Leveraged Figma to construct low-fi prototypes that demonstrated the placement of new features among the preexisting design. These prototypes focused only on how data would be presented to the user, forgoing colors and fine details to emphasize user flow.
User Interface Design: Incorporated the app's visual identity back into later iterations of designs, using Quickie's vibrant branding colors, clean design style, and seamless transitions. Modified iconography to ensure uniformity and carefully selected category names that made sense to the app's users, ensuring the interface is both functional and visually appealing.
Stage 4: Usability Testing
Conducted usability testing with a few of the original group of interviewees, gathering feedback on the functionality and impressions of the redesign. This phase was necessary to understand both the initial impressions of the new design changes as well as where users ran into issues. Overall, the new design features prompted positive reactions from users.
Left: Filters before color-coding in response to initial usability testing. Right: Filters after initial color-coding.
Fine-Tuning
Verbal suggestions as well as non-verbal confusion prompted certain changes. This included categorizing the filters on the "Search" page in some way, which I decided to address by color-coding filters.
Users also voiced concerns about the logistics of placing multiple orders at once, which I addressed by modifying the user flow within the prototype to restrict the placement of multiple orders simultaneously. Other minor changes were made to vertical and horizontal scrolling, cart management, and transitions between pages.
Color-coded filters after a second round of user testing after responding to feedback.
However, after I color-coded the filters in response to my initial user feedback, I ran these new changes (among the other changes I made) by two users again to see their thoughts. They mentioned concerns about eyestrain and potential low contrast, I changed the color choices once more to ensure the filter text remained legible for app users.
Stage 5. Final Product
After going through all the aforementioned design stages, I am left with my final product: a clickable, aesthetically pleasing, and much improved prototype of the original Quickie delivery application. All problems identified in my initial research were addressed, from the addition of new search functionality to a live delivery map of one's order to driver messaging capabilities.
One last time, I reviewed the final product with a few of the original interviewees so they would know how their feedback and user testing impacted the final design. This review allowed me to see the full positive impact of the changes I made and re-confirm the importance, in my mind, of continually consulting with users of throughout the design process.
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