E-commerce: Order Tracking

UX Research

Project Overview

S4D provides e-commerce platform to quick service restaurants (QSRs), such as New York Pizza and Telepizza. Since these QSRs offer delivery service, S4D’s e-commerce needs to allow users to track their order on the website after they place an order.

I received a task to improve the order confirmation page of S4D’s e-commerce platform. The goals of the task were to identify what information should be displayed on the page, and to find out when to update our users with the order status.

In order to achieve these goals, I conducted a survey and found out our users’ expectation. Based on the survey results, I also prepared the service blueprint to clarify the timing of updating the order status.

My Contributions

ROLE

UX Researcher

PROJECT TYPE

Project at S4D

TOOLS

Google Forms, Figma

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

LITERATURE REVIEW

At first, I explored the data from the past research. The past research includes our own research and online articles. Below is the takeaways from the review.

In a nutshell, our users...

Enjoy seeing the status of their order moving forward.

Get frustrated not when the order is delayed, but when the delay is not communicated to them.

How to show ETA

Type of ETA shown to users

Users would feel frustrated when they see ETA getting longer for no reasons. In order to prevent that, we might want to show the ETA in the following way.

Before dispatching:
Rough but correct ETA (e.g. ‘Your order will be delivered at 19:00-19:10’)
After dispatching:
Accurate and correct ETA (e.g. 'Your order will be delivered in 10 minutes’)

Communicating the delay

Users should be notified of the delay as soon as the delay is detected, which could be;

While user is placing an order
While user is waiting

How to utilise users’ waiting time

If users have something to do while they are waiting, they feel waiting time shorter than when they have nothing to do. Here are the examples of what we could do to help users kill time.

Show benefits of making an account

Users create an account

Promote loyalty program

Users join the loyalty program

Show rewards to loyalty members

Users explore the loyalty page

SURVEY QUESTIONS

The literature review answered a part of the research questions, but still more data was necessary to answer all the questions. Therefore, I decided to conduct user survey, which consisted of 12 questions.

SURVEY RESULTS

I managed to collect 20 responses. Among them, 75% orders food delivery on their mobile while 25% orders on desktop.

Activities

The answers to one of the survey questions revealed how they wait for the food delivery. Based on the results, we could assume the following;

Users often stay close to computer or mobile
Users are often in relaxing mode unless they have work/housework to do
In most cases, users stay at home

While you are waiting for your food to be delivered what do you usually do?

Order status

The survey also revealed users’ preference on how they receive the order status updates.

Their favourite channel to receive the updates turned out to be push notification (90%). Some users like to receive them via text message (35%), others found it unnecessary to receive them actively as long as they can check the status on the website (30%).

Based on this and the results below, we could say the following;

Many users want to receive push notifications especially about;

Delay
'We received your order'
'Your order is on its way'

Most of them don’t expect the constant updates

How often do you check the status of your order?

Information

From the survey, it became clear that users want to see the estimated time of arrival (ETA) at any stages of waiting time.

The information that they are interested differs depending on the order type (delivery or pickup).

When it is delivery, they would like to see the live location of the order. If it is pickup, they want to find restaurant’s contact detail quickly.

What information do you want to see on the order confirmation page?

Frustration

I also included some open-ended questions in the survey about their frustration and confusion.

It revealed that many of them share the same negative experience with ordering food online.

The most common frustration that they have was receiving not accurate ETA, followed by receiving not accurate order status.

USER JOURNEY MAP

Based on the survey results, I made several user journey maps to clarify what path our users would go through. Below are the two examples. One shows what inconvenience they might experience. The other shows what store could do to improve the situation.

SERVICE BLUEPRINTS

To clarify the optimised interaction between the customers and the store, I prepared the service blueprints per difference case.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

The key to happy customers is...

‘Honest, accurate and humane communication’

Here are the suggestions on how we could improve our users’ experience

Order status

Be accurate!!!
Send push notifications to key updates, such as;

Delay
‘We received your order’
‘Order is on its way’

Letting users configure the notifications is also an option
Other detailed order status updates can be displayed on the website

ETA

Early stage:
Use time frame (e.g. 18:00 - 18:20) to compensate lack of accuracy
Later stage:
Show X minutes left only when it’s very likely that it will be accurate
Avoid changing ETA multiple times. If it is inevitable, consider calling the customer

Apology

Apologise for delay or troubles
Provide compensation
Add the human touch :)