Carbonara: Task Framework
Delivery Food is harder than Delivering People
When Uber Eats first began, it was able to swiftly build on top of the platform built by the rides business, specifically a one-to-one-to-one relationship between: one courier, going to one restaurant to do a pick-up, and dropping off with one customer.
However, as the company evolved and grew, so did the complexity of the job, and on the horizon there was even more coming. I asked the Courier Design team a fundamental question:
“How do we transform an app focused on navigation to an app that helps you do tasks?
ROLE
Design leader
TEAM Deliverables
Design strategy
IA + Content needs
The Process: Information ARCHITECTURE
More job types means more problems. We already knew what was challenging “doing the job” in our existing three-sided marketplace (Restaurants, Eaters, and Couriers), but what would happen if we started sending people to pick up from restaurants not on our platform, or shop and pay for groceries, or do a task at any business, or to do two jobs at one business and deliver to more than one customer?
We needed to start by understanding the overall hierarchy information that our couriers needed to know at each stage of a job, and to break it down into “lego bricks” of information. The team started by answering:
What did you need to know about the overall job?
What tasks did you need to know at pickup and drop off?
What subtasks did you need to do at pickup and drop off
The Process: Design Jam
After determining the overall architecture of “doing the job,” the team did a teardown on the current experience.
During a subsequent series of half-day jams, the team determined the correct breakdown of handing tasks and subtasks inside the product app, the content “lego bricks” that needed to be accessible at each level, and set-up a timeline to begin to do concept development for the primary use cases.
The Process: Next Steps
My tenure with Uber Eats ended before I could segue into the next phase: concept development for the primary use cases for “doing the job” at restaurants not currently on our platform, but the team will be continue to drive this work in the first half of the upcoming year.