EATOJOY USER RESEARCH

2018

Eatojoy is a Hongkong based, take-out food ordering platform. Users can order and pay for foods from more than 3 thousand restaurants in advance and pick up onsite immediately when they swing by.
Launched in early 2018 on App Store and Google Play, it also can be accessed from the HK01 app in HTML format. It is a product that cooperated by DADI-01 and HK01, and it has more than 400 thousand users today.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study.

Overall Challenges

When I joined DADI-01, Eatojoy already launches a couple of early versions. Round’s of market promotions were already conducted, but only had hundreds of users who were all HK01’s employees.
Cross-team cooperations are always hard.
The development process of Eatojoy was simple: DADI-01 product and design teams took function requirements from HK01’s business and marketing teams, follow branding guidelines from HK01, hammered up what was required, and shipped.
After interviewed business experts from HK01 and our designers, I found the major problems were: we (HK01 and DADI-01) don’t have a product scope plan which is reflecting the business plan of Eatojoy; we don’t have any way to collect users’ voice and observe in-app user behavior data about how users’ doing with us.

Overall Challenges

When I joined DADI-01, Eatojoy already launches a couple of early versions. Round’s of market promotions were already conducted, but only had hundreds of users who were all HK01’s employees.
Cross-team cooperations are always hard.
The development process of Eatojoy was simple: DADI-01 product and design teams took function requirements from HK01’s business and marketing teams, follow branding guidelines from HK01, hammered up what was required, and shipped.
After interviewed business experts from HK01 and our designers, I found the major problems were: we (HK01 and DADI-01) don’t have a product scope plan which is reflecting the business plan of Eatojoy; we don’t have any way to collect users’ voice and observe in-app user behavior data about how users’ doing with us.

My Duties and More

As the director of UX teams of both HK01 and DADI-01, what I needed to do for Eatojoy was making sure 2 teams deliver smoothly without frictions, define, adjust, and guard the boundaries of duties.
And concerned me mostly, Eatojoy designers felt lost about working only in the implemental stage.

Eatojoy’s consumers’ end comes with IOS, Android, and HTML. The Restaurants’ end has PC web and android POSE machine.

Goals of Selling User Research

I want to lead the team to step out and reach more. So I decided to teach Eatojoy’s designers how to conduct user researches, which was tailored to the product’s state.
I was hoping to achieve these 3 goals by doing this:

• Cheer up Eatojoy’s designers with new skills and show them the way how designers get more influence among the product team.

• Bring up some imperfect aspects in Eatojoy’s product planning by users’ voices.

• Persuade stakeholders that user research and interaction data analyst are essential.

Research Planning

I designed a set of usability tests and questions with Eatojoy’s designers and PM. The materials were related to Eatojoy’s CX for both users and restaurants. Use handy user research tools Tale Book to record and sort the raw gettings.

Research team? Myself and the 3 Eatojoy designers and 3 designers who were interested in learning UR but from other projects.

Research Planning

I designed a set of usability tests and questions with Eatojoy’s designers and PM. The materials were related to Eatojoy’s CX for both users and restaurants. Use handy user research tools Tale Book to record and sort the raw gettings.

Research team? Myself and the 3 Eatojoy designers and 3 designers who were interested in learning UR but from other projects.

Consumer Apps Research

We started from the users’ end of Eatojoy. With minimal supports from the HK01 business department, we conduct 6 1:1 users interviews in 2 days, with interviewees who were all HK01 employees.
Even though it was a tough beginning, we can still scan out some usability problems which were ignored. In the research report, we bring out not only what valuable findings we have but also emphasized how we can do better if we got enough supports.
Eventually, folks in HK01’s business department realized it is worth to invest in user research after this approach.

Merchant’s End Research

We visited 9 restaurants which were covering 3 main areas in HK, covering Eatojoy’s current, ex, future partners.

Merchant’s End Research

We visited 9 restaurants which were covering 3 main areas in HK, covering Eatojoy’s current, ex, future partners.

Key Findings

A lot of hints were gathered, about how we can improve the UX on both user end and restaurant end.
Beyond that, we suggested a potential opportunity to improve the platform’s business performance, which is increasing investment in partnering with restaurants.
The primary pain points making users give up Eatojoy were basically all caused by poor participation of restaurants, e.g., always being off-line, delays in accepting orders, ugly food images, and intricate info.
On the other hand, using Eatojoy was needing extra efforts for restaurants, especially when the outcomes were low, and Eatojoy was not the only choice for them as the online storefront (Food Panda, Oopsie…). They have needs of customer supports, better product design to integrate online orders into their actual workflow, ways to get exposures, and, if they have, provide unique services via the online platforms, for example, provide delivery…
But the voices from restaurants were ignored by the HK01 business team before. So no matter how many resources were spent on promoting Eatojoy to users, users still gave up trusting Eatojoy after being disappointed by poor ordering experience.

Impacts in Business and Team Co-op

• After this researches, and with the help of our data tracking proposal, The Eatojoy team started using Google Analytics to cumulate user’s interaction data since late 2018, after the user research.

• After this researches, and with the help of our data tracking proposal, The Eatojoy team started using Google Analytics to cumulate user’s interaction data since late 2018, after the user research.

• Besides massive budgets on promoting to users’ end, the HK01 business department started to invest more in restaurant end, from partnership to upgrading the UX of their tools.

• Besides massive budgets on promoting to users’ end, the HK01 business department started to invest more in restaurant end, from partnership to upgrading the UX of their tools.

• Eatojoy’s designers have sits in early-stage meetings of every new version.

• Eatojoy’s designers have sits in early-stage meetings of every new version.

THANKS FOR WATCHING. 🤟

THANKS FOR WATCHING. 🤟