Foundational Research

From the beginning I made it my mission to understand the product and the idea to the fullest extent. The founder and I had many sessions together where we discussed his vision for the product, previous experiences and traction, his industry knowledge and even scheduled and conducted some calls with hypothesized end-users, trying to understand their needs and gauge how well they respond to our vision. The results were quite promising and enough for us to decide to pursue the initial idea. We confirmed that college students living on campus should be the primary target audience for the initial stages of the app, even though we knew we could extend our app onto other demographics.

Competitive analysis insights

As part of my foundational research, I dived in deep into the food delivery market, looking for clues, insights and ideas for the product. The following are my conclusions.

Insight 1: The food delivery market is saturated with competitors that offer similar features and have few unique selling points, if any. While some apps may have minor differences in features or user experience, overall there is little differentiation among them.

Insight 2: Despite the lack of differentiation, we discovered that most of our competitors have very efficient user journeys due to the market's maturity and high-efficiency-demanding nature.

Branding brainstorming

Early on we created multiple moodboards of visual styles, elements, slogans and more to gauge where Orderio would stand as a brand and present itself to the world. More on that later in the case study.

qualitative insights from the survey

• Students are very budget-driven and hate fees, love discounts and would like food delivery apps to be as transparent with pricing as possible
• No food delivery brand loyalty
• Students living on campus are quite social and community-driven
• Frustrated with the clutterness of most food delivery apps (too much info)

Key Challenges

Brand Unawareness & Distrust

Launching a product in a very saturated and mature market poses a big challenge for any startup and Orderio is no exception. The big challenge is winning over people’s attention, but more importantly trust, when a myriad of other extremely trusted food delivery products already exist.

Not Understanding the Product

Due to Orderio’s unusual business model, we knew that throughout development we would struggle with finding the right approach to explaining the product and how it works.

information Architecture

We kicked off the Ideate phase by creating an Information Architecture, which gave us a thorough overview of the scope and complexity of the app and gave me and developers a much clearer path forward. We've gone through a few cycles of corrections and arrived at the following diagram:

branding finalization

After 1-2 months of conversations, brainstorms, research and surveys, we were ready to move into the Design phase of our project, which we kicked off with finalizing our brand look and feel.

Building a design system

It was my job to establish a structured and thorough design system for the application to not only speed up the production of a high fidelity prototype, but also ensure clear communication with the stakeholders and developers.