Restaurant takeout app: Securing 77% user engagement with social features and intuitive search
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Project overview
Smaller restaurants find it virtually impossible to compete with larger chains on existing takeout apps. Food trucks and carts, in turn, usually can’t even use those apps well because their locations may change daily.
Our client, a U.S. startup, decided to help smaller businesses turn takeout into a steady revenue stream. To that end, the company envisioned Hundred Forks. This community-building mobile app would connect customers with local restaurants and food trucks/carts. Restaurant owners could manage their listings and orders with an intuitive tablet app.
It’s a win-win: customers get a convenient way to order takeout pickup, while small business owners generate orders by attracting customers in the area.
However, to make Hundred Forks a true time saver for both user categories, the startup needed an expert in human-centered design and cross-platform development. That’s why Hundred Forks turned to us.
Services
Challenges
Our client’s main challenge was making both apps intuitive and easy for the intended users. While customers were likely to have intermediate or advanced digital skills, restaurant owners were typically less well-acquainted with apps and used old tablets.
On top of that, our client sought to reduce development costs with a cross-platform tech stack. So, we had to ensure the app’s performance and user flows were flawless across devices and platforms, especially regarding location-based services.
Finally, we had to adapt user flows to both restaurants with a permanent location and mobile ones like food trucks and carts. That required carefully considering mobile restaurants’ needs and constraints while designing both apps.
Our extensive discovery phase identified our client’s key needs and technical requirements:
Strategic business needs
01 Launch a restaurant takeout mobile app that connects customers with small businesses in their area
02 Provide a tablet app for traditional restaurants and food trucks and carts for menu and order management
03 Minimize development costs with a cross-platform tech stack
04 Secure a user engagement rate of at least 70% for the mobile app
05 Achieve a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of at least 80 for both applications
06 Increase the number of placed orders by at least 30% within the first six months
Technical requirements
01 Design and develop a cross-platform mobile app for ordering takeout from small traditional and mobile restaurants
02 Implement map-based restaurant browsing and search, including for food trucks and carts
03 Design and develop a tablet app for restaurant owners, with support for food trucks and carts
04 Optimize the tablet app for older devices
05 Ensure the user flows and interfaces are adapted to users with varying levels of digital skills
06 Secure a task success rate of at least 85% for both apps
We’ll integrate your mobile, tablet, or web app with map services and make user flow intuitive.
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Solutions
We began our work on the project with comprehensive user research. We created three distinct user personas based on our findings: a busy sales manager, a food blogger, and a small restaurant owner.
We then designed the information architecture and created wireframes and prototypes for user flows. After multiple rounds of feedback and improvement, we proceeded with developing the mobile app for customers and the tablet app for restaurant owners.
We opted for Angular, Ionic, and Node.js as our tech stack to speed up development and reduce costs, with REST APIs powering third-party integrations. Our tech stack choices provided a perfect balance between code reusability and native-like performance and user experience, all while saving our client an estimated 32% in development costs.
After comprehensive testing and iterative refinement, we delivered two applications to our client:
- Takeout mobile app: It allows customers to discover restaurants nearby or on a specific route, browse menus, place takeout orders, share their experiences with friends, and browse other users’ feedback
- Restaurant tablet app: It enables restaurant owners to get listed on the mobile app, manage their menus, and receive and complete orders
Signup and onboarding
Mobile app users first encounter a welcome screen that guides them through signup. During onboarding, users can add their food preferences and specify allergies, which are then considered when browsing restaurants. The app also ensures that location services are on to enable a map restaurant view.
Our smooth onboarding showed the highest task success rate during our user testing. It amounted to 96%, as opposed to the average of 93% across the app.
Restaurant browsing and search
The homepage welcomes the user with restaurant recommendations based on the listed preferences and allergens. The map view, in turn, makes finding the right restaurant effortless, whether it’s a traditional restaurant or a food truck/cart.
To meet the needs of our user personas, we enabled searches both along a specific route and in the vicinity of the device’s current location. Extra filters facilitate search, such as the acceptable radius, restaurant category, and estimated prep time.
We ensured the REST API map integration’s high performance and fast loading times across devices. Our selected tech stack also enabled us to leverage the location services in a way indistinguishable from native app behavior. As a result, the map view is fast, convenient, and robust, driving user engagement to 77%.
Ordering and checkout
Every restaurant has a dedicated page showcasing its menu items, with delicious-looking food photos prominently displayed. Feedback from other users can also help customers make their choices. Menu items can also be filtered out based on known allergens.
We streamlined the ordering process to remove all friction from the user flows. As a result, adding menu items to a cart and placing an order takes only a couple of taps. At the same time, the checkout form collects all crucial information, such as contact details and the desired pickup time.
Our human-centered approach to designing these user flows paid off. The intuitiveness and ease of ordering were key drivers behind the app’s 88 CSAT score.
Post-checkout and post-order features
Once the order is placed, users can easily track its status within the app, with push notifications providing timely alerts about any changes based on the restaurant’s input. After pickup, users are encouraged to leave feedback, with private and public visibility settings for comments and ratings.
These features seamlessly promote engagement and community building within Hundred Forks. They contributed to a user engagement rate of 77% and a 43% increase in orders placed.
Foodcast
On Hundred Forks, users can send and receive friend requests and share their order experiences with friends using bright stickers. Foodcast, the application’s social media feed, is its heart: this is where users can see their friends’ orders, comments, and suggestions.
Some users may not know what they would like to order when they open the app. To help them make a choice, we added curated Top 10 Ordered Today and Top 10 Yum and Hits lists to Foodcast.
These social features drove user engagement, allowing Hundred Forks to secure a 77% engagement rate within the first six months.
Restaurant tablet app
Restaurant owners can use a dedicated tablet app to create their restaurant’s page, add single menu items and combos, and receive and manage orders. The tablet app’s onboarding guides owners through selecting the restaurant type and adding opening hours, estimated prep time, and details like pickup options.
We made the tablet app lightweight, ensuring its consistently high performance on older devices. We also tailored all workflows to users with different digital skills to make the app easy to use for any restaurant owner, securing a 91% task success rate.
Tech stack
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Impact
The applications’ smooth user flows and fast performance across devices allowed our client to benefit from:
We’ll select the most suitable cross-platform tech stack to speed up development while ensuring native-like UI/UX and high performance.
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LLC Darly Solutions's team performs well since the collaboration started. They are fluent in specific programming languages, they are also fluent in English, and they have a great response time. What is most unique and impressive about Darly Solutions is that everyone in the team is inherently communicative and understands the expertise of their respective fields. The team is very agile and can predict stress situations in which we work together to fix and maintain.
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By collaborating with Darly Solutions, there is a significant improvement in the project's quality of codes compared to their original codebase. They lead efficient project management and keep the client updated with their reports. They're a flexible team that delivers promising results. They don't just do as they're told, they actively participate in the design process, which is going to yield us a much better platform in the end.
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