Problem
Convenience delivery apps and services have become a common part of many people’s lives – there are apps to deliver groceries (Instacart, Dumpling, store-specific options), apps to deliver restaurant food (Grubhub, DoorDash, UberEats), and apps to deliver people (Uber, Lyft).
However, despite how common they are – there aren’t any major similar services yet designed for people attending concerts, sporting events or other arena/stadium events to get their concessions delivered to their seats. The only choice is to wait for a vendor to come around, or get up and miss part of the event to go get concessions yourself – both inconvenient. Given how easily accepted these services are in the rest of daily life, it seems like an obvious hole to fill.
Research
Target Audience
- Millenials (21-35)
- Current users of other convenience delivery apps
- This market already exists, you don’t have to convince people of the idea – just present that it exists in a new area.
Topics of Interest
- What makes people want to use (or NOT use) apps like this? Convenience? Perceived necessity? Cost? Features?
- What makes a business want to adopt, or NOT adopt, delivery platform services? As this could factor into being able to expand the product.
Findings
- Why do customers use apps like these?
- Convenience – biggest reason mentioned by far. You don’t have to go out or cook yourself, you can time when food will arrive (within a window), there’s greater flexibility for covering different tastes in one meal (especially regarding kids), and you don’t have to pull out your card at any point for the transaction.
- Variety – home cooking is limited by what’s on hand, and cooking ability. Everything nearby is an option with apps.
- Deliver anywhere – food doesn’t have to come to the house, it can go to wherever you happen to be.
- For businesses, the concerns seem to be mostly financial rather than app-specific functional issues, which is expected. Biggest concern is that the purchases now going through the app need to bring enough new customers to outweigh the service fees charged to the business, or they can actually lose money by offering these services. While economic concerns like this wouldn’t always necessarily directly affect design, this information should still factor into the design plan so it includes features/design intended to drive NEW sales, rather than only convert existing sales to app sales.
Competitive Research/Analysis
Out of those apps listed in the beginning, the Ubereats/Doordash category is the most similar to what I’d look to achieve with BeerMe.
Ubereats
Most review were about the service, rather than the app, but I was still able to draw out a few conclusions.
- Positives – People either like or are indifferent to the social aspects. They like that accounts are not locked to your devices.
- Negatives – They used to have a tracking feature that would let you compete against others for segments of your run (including leaderboards), but it was removed.
Key Takeaway
Persona
User Journey/Flow
Sketches/Ideation
Feature Prioritization
“Must” features that are common to most competitors:
- Live-tracking progress (a given – distance, calories, pace)
- Logging past exercise (the feature is common, but our method is not)
- Want to include an option to pull up past routes, so if the same route is logged often the user doesn’t have to retrace it each time.
- Progress history (daily, weekly, monthly)
Long-term/post-release features:
- Social/group options: the obvious social features like the option to share your route/exercise are pretty basic, but a more unique option (in an app where the point is logging routes) would be to pull down routes others have used so you could try them out. This would be best if it they were pulled anonymously (for user safety, so a given user can’t be tracked). Post-release feature, given that it requires an established userbase to be worthwhile.
“Optional”/Unnecessary features:
- A lot of apps have music options directly within the app. There are two reasons this feels unnecessary. First, with the rise of Spotify and other streaming apps, users are more likely to have set up their playlists, etc in an outside app actually dedicated to music. Second, for the same reason, it’s less common for people to buy/download/rip music files than it was ten years ago – and in-app music features usually run off the music files actually on your phone, so if there are fewer users with music files on their phone, the feature is closer to being a waste of resources.
- Food logging – as planned at the start, this would broaden the scope of the app beyond its initial intent. Could be a long-term goal if users wanted down the road, but not a focus.
- Coaching/training features – also a long-term feature that would likely end up in an app like this, but this is a feature that’s hard to differentiate much between apps. More likely to get added long-term than food logging, due to being more closely related to what the app is about.