top of page
Meet Harshit
Product Design, Holachef
May 2015 to December 2015
Hola... what?
Holachef, a food tech start-up, delivered home cooked food to customers and was operational in Mumbai and Pune. We on boarded home-chefs to prepare delicacies which they were best at and posted them on our platform. Customers, ideally migrants, could have home cooked food from the comfort of their office or home. We managed the rest.
​
When I joined Holachef, it had just received a fresh round of funding. Hiring was rampant, processes were non existent and I saw the company grow from 30+ full time employees to 150+ in 8 months.
My Role
I was responsible for designing apps for internal customers which would improve operational efficiencies. Right information at the right time reduces confusion and enables better decision making.
Problem Areas
The first step was to understand how the organization worked to find and prioritize problem areas.
​
Let's understand how Holachef worked (diagram below) :
1. The process started with menu planners who communicated menu for the coming week to home chefs.
2. Home chefs prepared food by the designated time for each shift (lunch, snack & dinner).
3. Runners delivered the food from home chefs & vendors to fulfillment centre - inventory reception.
4. Cooked food went straight to heaters or chillers as needed.
Food raw materials went to in-house kitchen.
Non food items (disposable containers, cutlery, bags etc.) went into it's respective inventory.
5. Food was assembled as per order placed and delivery time selected.
6. Orders were chunked for better efficiency.
7. Order chunk assigned to a runner.
8. Order delivered to the customer.
9. Customer gives feedback which helps us plan menu for the next week.
After studying the system and understanding critical bottlenecks, the management and I prioritized projects as follows, most critical being number 1.
1. Dispatch Management App
2. Menu Planning App
3. Runners App
4. Inventory Management App
At present I am going to focus on Dispatch Management App project, from research till final output.
Problem Statement
The fulfillment centre already had an app to manage dispatch but it wasn't good enough, my job was to make it better keeping following pointers in mind:
1. Staff at fulfillment centre were to be cross trained - a new user should be able to figure out how to use the app within minutes. No formal training should be required.
2. Back-end code change should be minimal.
Research
Research duration: 3 weeks
Research method:
1. Participant observation
2. Spontaneous interviews
3. Current dispatch management app analysis - UI level
User persona:
AGE: 18 to 40
FAMILY: Single and married
WORK: Delivery executive / Staff
LOCATION: Mumbai
EDUCATION: Usually a high school graduate
TECH AFFINITY: High, more than 90% of staff owned an android phone (the year is 2015)
Interviews:
More than 20 employees from different departments and designations like delivery executive, assembly manager, customer support executive & fulfillment centre management were interviewed to better understand the system and potential impact of change. Insights were as follows:
1. Orders are ideally grouped based on pin-codes, areas & subareas
2. No way to show pre-orders - what's the whole point of a pre-order if it does not reach on time?
3. Orders paid through net-banking were a priority as in case of a cancellation, initiating refund for the same was a hassle
4. An order above ₹1000 need not be clubbed, it'll have enough food for a single delivery executive to carry.
5. Users got fatigued after using the UI, primarily because it was difficult to read information
6. Delivery executives were hesitant to use the app as it looked too technical - difficult to onboard.
7. UI was not designed to be scalable - difficult to add more functionality.
UI Analysis:
1
2
1.
- Two click process for every filter
- No grouping of filters - meal, geography, etc.
- No distinction w.r.t. function - filters, search and print orders are primarily different functions.
- Grey, grey, grey....
2.
- Repetition of CTA's - Dispatch Order & Print
- Name and cell phone number of customers irrelevant when chunking orders
- Again, grey....
Ideation
LOW FIDELITY MOCKS
- Trying different layouts for the UI - information groups and filters.
- Quickly moved to software to better understand the scale of UI.
MID FIDELITY MOCKS
- Better understanding of scale, in turn better understanding of font application
- Figuring out optimal use of colors
HIGH FIDELITY MOCK
Permanent info. like present app, date, time, search & refresh.
Order chunks,
see prototype
Quick toggle between apps
Filters
List of orders, more vertical space = can see more orders.
- List of orders get maximum vertical space so that maximum information is displayed at a time.
- Colors are used sparsely to make them pop!
- Single click filters arranged as a funnel (top to bottom) - a logic in which orders were usually filtered
Solution
Orders could be seen on map according to it's location, which would help club the orders in a better way. The functionality was WIP at the time.
A toggle between apps - keeping it scalable for future apps
Order value (₹) >1000 = red,
500 - 999 = orange
0 - 499 = black
Pre-orders (binary information) - priority customers
Shows present day by default, user may want go to previous day to search a particular order in case of a complaint. User may want to check coming days to see pre-orders.
'Export to Excel' - to share data with other departments
Net-banking (binary information) - priority customers
Total orders to judge that day's workload.
Irrelevant information hidden. Click '+' and the row expands to show more information
Single click filters
Drop-down menu
Two-tone rows for better readability
Prototype
Next: UX Design, Zynga
bottom of page