Case study: Did we order this? Was it good?

A quick feature idea

TL;DR
I designed a concept for an add-on feature that keeps track of all of the food you ordered and logs which specific dishes you should order again.

Here’s the prototype.

The missing piece

We’re lucky to have a lot of food options around us, so we order food often. The problem is we never remember if it was good.
A typical conversation in our house:

This meal was very meh
The ravioli and bread were good but the soup had too much kale
Ok so we should try this place again, but shouldn’t get the soup
Let’s remember that for next time

— a few weeks later —

I feel like we ordered from here before?
Maybe?
Was it good?
I don’t know.
Ooh the soup looks good let’s get that

🙃
Talk about first-world problems.

But, being a designer, I feel like there needs to be a solution. I want to be able to log what dishes I liked so I can order them again. I want to be able to remind myself that I definitely did not like that garlic ramen and omg what was I thinking.

I ended up thinking about it so much that I had to sit down and mock it up quickly.

Since we have been ordering food directly from Google recently, it made sense to think of this feature as an add-on to the Google food ordering experience.

Ordering food on Google — have you tried it yet?

Here’s what I had in mind:

Collecting information about my order experience

Basically, I want my phone to buzz about an hour after we get the food and ask me if I would order from this restaurant again. If I say “Yes”, take it a step further and ask if I would order each dish again.

Pizza? Yes. Fish sticks? No.

I also want to be able to add notes about the restaurant, and choose from canned suggestions like: quick, cheap, big portions, etc… and be able to add my own.

Note: too spicy for me!

The full logging interaction should happen in my notifications. Easy.

Next time we order:

See my past orders and preferences

Next time we’re hungry, I want to be able to see all of our past orders and very quickly understand which dishes we should order again.

Green means yes. Red means no.

Obviously, we should be able to easily reorder from here. It should be quick and simple. I’m thinking this would appear in the overflow menu (maybe the ‘kebab' menu is a more appropriate name in this case 😊).

More UX thoughts

• The data collection should be for my benefit only. This information should not be used to give the restaurant a rating, or to recommend dishes to others, but for me to know what I want to get next time.
• That being said, this very specific information about my likes and dislikes can be used to find me a dish match in other restaurants and make some data-driven private recommendations.
• It would be great if this feature could scrape my inbox and find all of my past food orders, so I could easily log those too.
• This feature should allow multiple users to input joint notes — so my husband should be able to come in and say that the burger from Gnarly Eats 1 was better than the burger from Gnarly Eats 2. But they were both still really good. And they have tater tots! (not sponsored)
• I would love to have this integrated to Google Home so I could say (in the most amazing lazy way) “Hey Google order from Table 87” and it would know what I want, and pizza would magically appear on my doorstep.

Some UI Thoughts

• I stuck to Google’s Material Design, and followed the patterns in their newer apps like Google Pay and Google Now. This would look great in the new Material You.
• I would want a more elegant way to indicate ‘order’ vs. ‘don’t order’. This needs to work for all users, including visually impaired and color blind. The green and red dots are a quick MVP solution.

That’s it! Just a small new feature that can be added to any food delivery service.

Here’s the link to the prototype again.

Thank you for reading!