I have decided to re-design the desktop web application of Just Eat because at the time of working on this project I personally was struggling to use the service. As a person that is eating takeaways very often using services such as Deliveroo and Ubereats I wanted to try something different. Just Eat has been a leader in the online takeaway food market worldwide offering to the customers a secure platform for ordering and paying for food from the restaurant partners. On average, it is processing 3 orders per second in the UK thanks to their nine million customers and the company’s value has reached £5.5bn, twice as much as M&S. Whereas the native app is more usable, the desktop web application was suffering of major usability issues.

Since there is a growing demand for takeaway food, a shifting in the users eating habits and the market shows that the business will grow rapidly in the next 3 years, I believe that Just Eat needs to improve their services as new applications such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats emerged. I believe that this is the time to be more competitive, focus in the future of this industry and try to see what the latest products do well or even better than them, so they can stay on the top of the list.

In order to get a better idea of the market , I did a competitive analysis trying to find out what the other companies do well and what not so well. I used parameters such as the information they provide about the restaurants, the food delivery, the ratings, the aesthetics and the interaction. I used only the website versions on a desktop computer.

I decided to use a one-shot test because I didn’t want to compare Just Eat to other systems such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats but actually wanted to see how novice users of the Just Eat system feel about the website application, how easy it is to learn how to use it and how and what needs improvement.

Despite the increasing use of mobile devices has shifted consumers to use the Just Eat application, there are still lots of users that do not have a smart phone, have difficulties focusing on a smaller screen or prefer to use a computer (elder people).

The main demographic of Just Eat consumers is families and students. Families place order of bigger value, whereas students keep it cheap and for fewer people. The shifting of lifestyle towards busy routines and the growing variety of takeaway food, especially the healthier options available, has shaped the consumer’s preferences. They prefer meals, convinient to their busy schedules and they see takeaway food delivery as a daily food habit. Men are buying takeaway food more often.

My next step was to create a set of personas based on the research I have done about the target audience and the sample of participants I had for the testing. Based on the personas I drew a Task Analysis Models that showed for each persona the way users sequence their actions and what pain points find and where.

I did a Hierarchical Task Analysis for the same tasks I provided in the usability testing. The reason was that I wanted to graphically represent the as-is interaction versus the to-be interaction which is going to mirror the design recommendations from the table of usability issues and Object Analysis. Below it we see the emotional map of the user.