Revamping Dunzo’s order tracking experience
Dunzo is a hyperlocal delivery service based in India.
This is a short tale of how we went the extra mile to improve and redesign the order tracking experience for our customers.
Responsible for driving initial research, proposing the project, conceptualisation, design, and delivery of key modules and feature areas.
Me working as a solo product designer with a user researcher, product manager, engineers, copywriter, graphic designer and a motion designer
Sneak-peek
The Problem
As Dunzo was scaling, new customers were being introduced to the world of getting ANYTHING delivered to their doorstep. Although an order gets delivered in 25–30 minutes, even that time feels like eternity to a lot of people, and induces anxiety due to customers constantly thinking about it.
Why is this a problem?
We noted down everything that we could gather from support tickets, talking to customers, by looking at the data and focused on questions like
When do users call their delivery partner the most?
Why do they cancel their order?
Why do they reach support?
How many times do they call the partner?
How many times do users open the tracking screen?
Do customer know what happens when they place an order?
As a result of this, we were able to have an idea about the thoughts that pop up in a user’s mind due to multiple variable factors. It's definitely not a relaxed state to be in!
We noticed these key behaviours displayed by our customers during an ongoing order
So, what do we need to do?
Laying the foundations
We decided to focus on the below targets based on what we learnt from our findings
A major realisation was that we need to increase the trust between the customers, and the delivery partners. With increase in delivery apps, and given how fast they were getting, we often forget who is doing it all on the other end.
Looking at what exists
Setting out to solve 🎯
Tone of voice - Making it more Real and Human
To bridge the gap between our users and partners, we needed to rethink how we portray our superhero partners via the app. Below is the design before the revamp
After looking at our old designs and other similar products, we realised that there is a certain sense of coldness in the way most products behave and speak to their customers.
To put our partners in the centre of the experience, we decided to go ahead with portraying the entire communication from the partner’s point of view. To do this we thought of replacing the order status communication with a chat bubble.
Almost everyone around us uses some or the other way to chat and interact with other people.
This also meant delivering status updates in
1st person, as if they were coming from the partner
Using emojis and making you feel that the partner is actually talking to you
It is not easy to be a delivery partner in India and we wanted to make the experience of using Dunzo more human and relatable.
We realised that this UI + 1st person communication isn't enough to replicate the real world. If the communication is always the same whenever an order is raised and does not adapt to scenarios like rain/delay/traffic etc., it won't be of much use.
Transparency at every step of the process
The status updates need to be delightful, and instil confidence in them to trust the service and the partner. We made sure that the same message is written in different styles to give it a surprise element and a human touch.
Breathing life in the content and designs
Tipped the partner? They will thank you themselves 💚
An Alive and Slick experience ⚡️
Hmm…Does this solve it?
The above changes made huge difference to what existed and we felt we were close to our goals. We felt that the communication was now better, more human and made the partner a part of the experience.
But, even after these changes, just writing the updates in ‘text’ is only for those who might pay attention, or can read everything. Moreover, it leaves a huge gap when nothing is happening on the map and induces more anxiety.
To solve the above issues, we decided to add a visual element to assist in communicating.
We really wanted to show what happens during an order.
Hence, whenever the map does not communicate any useful info about what’s happening, the view automatically switches to an animated state to showcase what's happening.
Showing animations when the partner is stationary gives a feeling that things are moving and order is in process. This will help in reducing overthinking and the feeling of being lost by the customer.
It helps us in communicating the emotions and real world problems involved and adds delight to the entire process!
Each real world scenario, type of order is reflected in the animations to portray a better picture of what’s going on in the order.
Capturing the real India
Visuals inspired from the real world
Capturing India in the way we communicate too
Inclusion at the heart of our designs
We wanted to make sure we take care of representation in the visuals and do away with the stereo types that exist in the society via our designs.
We made sure to show women as delivery partners and store owners
Our dunzo characters come from different backgrounds and from different parts of India
Because we did not know much about our customer, we did not leave anything to assumption and tried not highlight anything in that character and tried to keep the illustration neutral.
Garnishing the experience with some zest..
To make sure our customers feel closer to the service, and to surprise them everytime them place an order, we added a new section called 'Dunzo Tales' to the experience.
The section has interesting and unknown facts about how people use dunzo. Moreover, it celebrates the cusotmers' achievements which lead to the users feeling closer to Dunzo, and more invested in the service.
This puts a smile on the users’ face and makes them want to share and talk about it!
And this is exactly what happened. Lots of customers shared screenshots of Dunzo tales after being delighted on reading some interesting facts or being nostalgic about some cool old tales!
Strengthening the user-partner relationship
We wanted to take an extra step in celebrating our delivery partners and bridging the gap between our users and the partners. For that we added a 'Know your partner' section which celebrates partner’s achievements earned while working.
Love on social media ❤️
There's nothing more special than a team to see the product being talked about by the customers on Social Media without any incentive. As soon as we launched this feature, it went viral on Twitter and LinkedIn with tons of customers talking about how good they feel about the update.
Impact of the revamp
The overall impact of the project was positive. Nevertheless, there were tons of learnings and a lot of areas to improve upon. Feel free to reach out to know more about how we all worked together to ship the project.
For future, we had planned a lot of updates which were also shipped by the team at Dunzo after I left the team. Updating animations based on weather conditions, traffic, adding copy localised to area and much more!
Thanks for making it till the end :)