HOTBOX PLUS: enabling seamless food deliveries
CLIENT
HotBox Food, Italy and Innovation Catalyzer
THE TEAM
Bharat | Hymke Hemstra | Ludovica Rossi| Nupur P.
DURATION
5 months
CATEGORY
User Research | UI/UX Design | Design strategy | Design ethics
MY ROLE
UX researcher | UX Designer | Visual Designer | Project Manager
CONTEXT
In the last few years, the global pandemic has accelerated the growth and expansion of food delivery businesses. This has led to a shift in customer behaviour toward the convenience of cooked meals delivered to their doorstep. As a result, there is more pressure on restaurant managers to ensure timely order preparations, preserving food quality during deliveries or managing riders.
Our client created Hotbox, a ventilated professional oven that can control humidity and temperature between 65 and 85°C. Hotbox ensures warm and high-quality home deliveries without making the food cold or soggy. Because Hotbox allows multiple stops on a single trip, restaurateurs can be considerably more efficient in making higher numbers of quality deliveries, improving their business. To take advantage of this new possibility, Hotbox has developed a custom IoT board to gather data from sensors (Speed, GPS and Accelerometer).
THE CHALLENGE
This created a need to organize & make sense of the IoT data in a useful digital application for managers to understand their business efficiency. Our design challenge was to make sense of the gathered IoT data and depict how it may benefit the key stakeholders (managers, riders and customers) in the system. Besides this, the 3 key challenges of the brief were to-
DEEP DIVING INTO RESEARCH
The key research questions were to make sense of the IoT data collected by the smart Hotbox oven during deliveries, identify how can this data be useful to all the stakeholders involved in the system. To further understand the multiple stakeholders in the system, we created a stakeholder matrix of interest, identifying managers, riders & customers are the direct stakeholder in the system. We created an ecosystem map of all components in the system to identify the appropriate research methods.
We performed an in-depth desk research to learn about the project context such as conditions of riders, IoT technology, sustainability in the IoT etc. We conducted personal interviews with several restaurant managers & riders to learn from their stories & gain insights about their everyday experiences. We also created a customer surveys to learn about general perceptions of ethics of food delivery system. After completing all the interviews & survey we used affinity and empathy mapping to cluster key research insights. This gave a holistic idea of most important patterns & opportunities for the project.
CONCEPTING & IDEATION
Concepting & ideation was a critical phase for the project where we explored different ideation methods such as word-concept association to validate some of the key insights that came up from interviews & surveys. We then tried to cluster our key concerns into HMW questions. Our team wanted to visualize other ideas than a digital solution so we tried rapid paper prototyping to gain clarity on some of our initial thoughts. We created experience journey maps for all stakeholders to map their goals, challenges, needs and opportunities. We further use scenario mapping that helped us identify multiple possibilities that can happen in the project context.
To get some more clarity of on how the restaurant and delivery system works, we tried role playing and wizard of Oz in our group. Each group member in the team role played as separate actor in the system where one-person acted as the backend system relaying messages. This method was useful to identify some key design directions such as challenges of discovery location of rider and how it can affect drop off time, need for riders to take a break after completing a long route, etc.
OPPORTUNITY MAPPING,
TASK FLOWS & WIREFRAMING
We created a value proposition map to outline the design differentiated features from existing products. We combined the three most important parameters for the managers in the same page - the maps, orders & deliveries in the same view to provide them a holistic visibility unlike other existing restaurant apps.
We created the task flow of the dashboard features using the value proposition map & HMW questions. This step was helpful to map an effective task flow based on research findings. The rider app gave us an overview of key interaction of riders & help understand the flow with the manager’s app. This was a helpful exercise to understand the connection between the two apps and make things more cohesive.
HOTBOX PLUS APPS FOR RESTAURANT MANAGERS & RIDERS!
Existing restaurant manager apps do not assist clubbing multiple orders or assigning deliveries to riders digitally. Managers club orders manually by looking at the proximate locations and then assign deliveries to the rider arriving first.
Hotbox Plus provides managers a real time status of order locations and delivery movements on the map. Managers can simply accept orders and move them to the kitchen. The App also shows Rider ETA visibility for on-route deliveries, which aids in order preparation and optimizes pick time for upcoming deliveries, which is not the case at present.
Once orders are ready, managers can select various orders and assign them to the approaching rider. The system then suggests a route with multiple deliveries that helps riders to easily discover locations. In addition, Hotbox plus also has a dashboard that can help managers to understand data easily by providing actionable insights.
In the Hotbox Plus rider app, riders receive order locations one at a time and make multiple deliveries as routed by managers without relying on their mobile data for communication. This app also notifies riders about bad road conditions in advance and prompts them to take breaks after completing a long route. All communication between actors is relayed through a server so riders or customers don’t share their personal information with each other.
PROJECT IMPACT
Our project will enable Hotbox Food to expand from selling IoT enabled ovens to end-to-end restaurant delivery management services. Based on our design, Hotbox Food undertook a pilot to develop a small proof of concept of the Hotbox Plus manager app focused on providing ETA visibility of fleet to restaurants. This Hotbox Plus pilot MVP app has enabled the company from selling Hotbox oven to more clients in Italy as restaurants see more value from an integrated digital platform. Post pilot, Hotbox Food will be taking up the app for full development. View the project overview that we created as a pitch here.
