Subscribed to Swiggy : How we designed a new feature for Swiggy in 6 days.
I have been a regular user of Swiggy ordering my favorite meals every weekend. During a college course, my friends and I were posed with a design challenge to propose a ‘new feature’ that would add to Swiggy’s Product.
The design challenge was a one week intense brain workout where we received new set of instructions everyday and were expected to deliver by EOD 😶.
Let’s jump into the journey, shall we?😁
Day 1 : Calling Dibs on Swiggy
We were briefed by our lecturer to make a design team of 3 and select a brand to work on. Of course, we called dibs on Swiggy and were excited to bring something new to the table (pun intended🙃).
Day 1 was to get to know Swiggy more. We did a secondary research and studied it’s presence. We dug into the play store and app store to find how users reviewed about the application, highlighted the positive and negative comments, made a list of it’s primary, secondary and tertiary competitors and called it a day.
Following, we mapped out the props, processes, touchpoints and actors of Swiggy’s current experience using a Service Blueprint with the aim of learning it’s ecosystem.
Day 2 : Mapping the Competitors
We spent Day 2 creating a Competitor Map of Swiggy, going through the competitor’s applications, flows and features. Eatiko, Zarooz and Fatafat were some other direct competitors mapped and they had lesser scope and features compared to Swiggy. Also, we understood that Zomato was not only the closest competitor to Swiggy, but also provided highest number of features to its users. Zomato not only provided delivery services but also captured Dine-in experiences to it’s users.
Day 3 : Getting to know the users
The next step was to understand why users engage with swiggy. What are their expectations, needs and motivations. While Swiggy’s users have varied intentions, we drafted two personas; where the users were i) more dependent and ordering almost everyday and ii) less dependent and ordering occasionally. This helped us identify few pain points that users are facing and could be solved. From this, we recognized that users who are dependent on Swiggy more, are critical to consuming healthier food in comparison to users who order occasionally.
Day 4 : Questioning What Users Want
Day 4 was intense where we further brainstormed on identifying what users want. With Jobs-to-be-done framework , we put ourselves in user’s shoes and identified the situations, motivation and expected outcome. Surprisingly, this tool gave us number of opportunities for a new feature (and turned out to be my personal favorite activity 🥰) and we were able to group the use cases and find common patterns.
Following this, we grouped different problems and opportunities that we identified from Jobs-to-be-done framework. We also sat down and brainstormed on current technologies, themes and opportunities from the top of our heads (that we as users might also want) and made a list which I’d like to call ‘The Opportunity Menu’. (thematic enough?😎)
Day 5 : What is Worth?
While there are many problems in the world, we talk a lot about Global Warming in general because that’s worth a thought and could affect something critical : our existence. Similarly, while we were delighted to have found a number of opportunities, we now had to question ‘what is worth solving?’
We mapped the thirteen opportunities in a graph to identify which of them were most important (for the user) and feasible. Clearly items 3, 6 and 13 were winners here.
Next, we used the Kano Model to evaluate which of the ideas would provide maximum customer delight while providing a strong function for the product.
From this, we evaluated opportunity numbers 13, 3, 6 ,8 and 10 were top contestants and we announced number 3 as our winner (based on interest, scope and time). Now we formed our design brief which is stated below.
“Help users who want to frequently order food using Swiggy to avoid the hassles of ordering food on a regular basis.”
Day 6 : ‘Designing’ the Feature
While a feature seems a simple addition to a system, there is a lot that goes into designing it. It is like adding a new gear into an already running machine, if you do not consider the functioning of fellow gears, it’s likely that your ‘new’ gear can disrupt a working system.
Soon as we knew subscription feature is our new addition, we asked many questions;
1) how will the user be informed of this feature, 2) how it would work, for whom would this be, what details do we need from the user, 3) how will one use it, 4) what if the user want’s to book for a loved one, 5) what if the user is on vacation. The more we answered the questions, the closer we got to the packaged solution.
After framing our questions, we began answering them by ideating, wireframing and lots of discussion. Once we felt everything is coming together, we started applying Swiggy’s Design theme to make our final Prototype. Tada! We made it!🥳
Lets talk about the feature:
Feature : Subscribe to meals on Swiggy
Problem : From our research, we found that there could be users who are regularly dependent on Swiggy for food. Imagine, Rohan, an engineering student living in the south and not loving the mess food. He misses having North Indian Meals and wishes to get the same for dinner everyday
Opportunity : Swiggy can have it’s inhouse cloud kitchen where they sell basic meals. Rohan could subscribe to North Indian thali for dinner everyday and get dishes accordingly.
(To feel personal, we wished to address our user as‘ Reena’. Follow how Reena could subscribe to Swiggy 😊)
Answer 1 : Reena discovers the new feature from home screen
Answer 2: Reena tell us about yourself! We need to know Reena’s meal preferences, the time slots, preferred days and allow her to subscribe to awesome food everyday!
Answer 3 : Reena must be informed about her food status, every time she expects a meal.
Answer 4: What if Reena’s parents are staying with her and she cannot cook meals on Thursdays as she has early work call? Wait, what if she could make different subscriptions for her dependents?
Answer 5: If Reena is on a vacation and temporarily does not require meals, she could simple pause it, na?
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the Magic Team🤙 : Mrnual Mule, Vaishnavi Borse and myself who built this feature together.
I would like to mention Mr. Akhil Paul, our mentor who guided us on this project.
