Adding a Group ordering feature to our WYNE app to make it more feasible for users who enjoy wine with large groups.

Overview

It’s undeniable that Wine is for sharing, for drinking with friends or family over a meal. Enjoying a good wine, we are often told, requires companionship. The joy, the sense of discovery, occurs when it is collective.
Having a Group order feature in a mobile app that recommends wine for a large group will add more value to the success of the product. This is what I did for our WYNE app. Group ordering in our app is the most awaited feature and the most demanding as well.

As a UX/UI designer at WYNE, I designed the group order feature from start to finish.

Duties: UX Research, Ideating, UI design, Prototyping, Usability study, Testing

Tools: Paper, Pen, Figma, Mira, Jira, Asana, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Google meet

Though there is a group ordering feature in a lot of food delivery apps and online delivery apps, none of the products that sell/recommend wine has this feature that can make users order wine with their friends or group at a restaurant.

Empathize

User Interviews/Survey: We included the group ordering questions in the user survey that we did during the start of our product development to get to know our user’s thoughts on the feature. With finely curated multiple-choice questions, we were able to extract their needs and pain points while group ordering online. This gave us tremendous insight into how we can create a wonderful group ordering experience that users can embrace socially.

I expanded my research and did user interviews to find out the process behind the user ordering wine for a group. With the open-ended questions, I was able to reflect on their needs and struggles while ordering for a group. Some of the takeaways from the user interviews have been jotted down that helped us direct the group ordering flow of our app.

Analyzing the trend with the latest demand in online ordering, I scrutinized the delivery apps having the group order feature. With the competitive analysis, I was able to come out with some of the things that seem to be not working for the user and can be added to our app to make it stand out in the market crowd.

• Easy navigation for the user with the group order.

• Confirmation for the owner regarding the invitees joined/rejected.

• The owner can back out from the order at any stage during group order.

User persona: Analyzing the data extracted from our research, I synthesized them to define the core problems that were identified and came up with a problem statement. Creating personas and user stories helped me to keep my efforts more human-centered to give it a head start to ideation.

With a solid background of knowledge from the first two phases, I started looking for alternative ways to make the group ordering feature more efficient and identify innovative solutions by thinking out of the box. I started determining opportunities for solving the user’s problem with the design using “How might we” questions.

We started ideating scenarios where the user needs to go through the group ordering flow to reach his/her goal under different circumstances. User flows helped us to unveil any hindrances they may have as they attempt to navigate through the different options, and screens of our group ordering feature, as well as reveal any possible areas of friction.

Once I was able to arrive at the user flow for different scenarios, I started doing the high-fidelity prototypes instead of wireframes or low-fidelity ones since we already have our app screens ready and needed to add the feature with some changes. Along with designing the screens, I also documented the possible actions that are needed to finish the full Group order user flow for the PWA version in a PDF file. With the above user flows for the user into consideration, we started optimizing the user flow path to make it more efficient using iterations.

Testing

After finalizing the user flow with the high-fidelity screens, I started with our usability testing concentrating on the effectiveness and efficiency of the group ordering feature. I did some of the usability tests at the restaurants and also some online using the Miro testing tool. For the given tasks, Users had some issues with the design as well as with the

After making the necessary changes to the Group order feature user flow and screens with the user feedback, I conducted the second usability test in order to know the effectiveness of the changes that we made from the first test. After a lot of discussions and considering the user feedback from the second test, I made some design changes and came up with an optimized flow which is yet to be released in the next version of our wyne application. Hence just putting a preview of our Group ordering feature below.

Future work

As our first version of the WYNE application is released, we are planning to implement the Group ordering feature in our next version. Still, we need to align the screens with the current version of our application. Testing needs to be done for the refined version of the Group ordering feature before it needs to be released.

Also, rough ideations for the next feature i.e Rewards program have been designed to be introduced in the next version of our app along with Group ordering.