Problem Description
You are building an app for in-flight food ordering.Some of the key questions to keep in mind
1) What do you think is the market size.
2) How do you get traction/user adoption for this app?
3) Create a wireframe that you’d use to sell.
4) How do you see v2/v3 of this app shaping?
Problem Solving Approach
I am using the Design-thinking process to solve this problem.Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.
Empathise
Background
Why are we here?
We are going to build a food ordering app for ordering food inside the Flights.
What’s the problem and why do we need really need the product ?
Due to COVID-19 Situation there is a need to make things digitize to avoid people to people contact and direct communication between them.Enabling the people travelling in flights to order food easily without any hassle.So most of the time what happens is
- We need to tell the Air Hostess about what we want to eat ( Mostly in Indian Domestic Flights)
- Most of the Passengers need time to think or want the food/beverages to arrive at their place at a particular time which is not possible with the current offline system as food is taken to all passengers place at a same standard time.
What’s the opportunity for us?
- The population of India is projected close to 1.380 billion or 1,380 million or 138 crore people in 2020.
- According to Statista it’s seen that 341 million people are using Airlines which is about 24% of the Indian population.
- Let’s assume that only about 40% of the passengers travelling in Airline like to order food or buy it ( This assumption is made on some user interviews, passenger experiences and. persona analysis)
- So the Total Addressable Target Market is 136 million people ( Which includes both Domestic and International Flight passengers )
Solution Proposal
- A Hybrid app in-flight food ordering app that allows users to
Order the food they want,
Select timing ( At what time they want it ),
Pay by Online payment methods ( Debit/Credit cards and popular UPI and Wallets ). - A web dashboard to see the orders that the passengers have ordered for flight crew and the airline catering services.
Product Strategy
- Use White Label product features ( As it’s a food ordering app we can try to incorporate features that already work from successful products)
- We can use the law of UX known as Jakob’s Law to take this decision. This Law states that “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
- Selling our product as a SaaS ( Software as a Service) to the airline businesses.
Research
According to Research and user interviews I was able to arrive at a below conclusions.the target audience here are the people who often travel by Flights and the people who are part of the Airline Catering Services or crew.
Major User Segments
- Upper Middle Class People ( Who travel by flights Occasionally)
- White Collar and Business People ( Business Development Executives , International Partnership Specialist )
- People in Leadership roles in any company ( CEO,Founder,CXO etc )
- Travellers ( Vlogger’s and popular Youtuber’s who review places )
User Interviews
As the time period was very less I was not able to roll on User Surveys and select participants from it, So I directly started interviewing some my friends and Friends of friends ( I am an active community guy ) who frequently travel in flights .
Questions I asked during the User Interview
1) When did they recently travelled in flight? ( Just to get to know about their recent experiences )
2) Do they eat food during Flight travel ? What is the process of Ordering food in flight? ( To understand the domain and the existing user flow )
3) How was their experience in ordering food in flights Before Covid and after Covid? ( To get to know about any difference in process or new pain points )
4) What are the things they like while ordering food in flight? ( What user likes)
5) What are the pain points or the things they need for ordering food in flights?(to get to know what are the needs of users and their pain points)
Apart from these I asked a followup questions and it was a semi-structured Interview.
Some of the strategies I followed during user interviews
Do’s
- DO ask users about their most recent experience By asking about their most recent experience, you're asking for something specific, concrete, and easy to remember.
- DO ask users to show, not just tell
- Ask why users like a solution
Try to find the needs or pain points that are the root cause
Dont’s
- DON’T ask questions that are too general
- DON’T ask irrelevant questions
- DON’T ask hypothetical or “Why not?” questions People are bad at predicting their own behaviour!
- DON’T ask leading questions
Leading questions imply a desired type of answer or “lead” users in a particular direction — like here, implying that the user finds the app to be frustrating.
Interview Synthesis
Here are the interview notes based on my conversation with target audience
Define
Personas
The personas include End User and the Cabin crew handling the food orders
Competitor Analysis
In order to build any product, analysing the competitive products is the most important things as it will help us to convey our value proposition and stand out of the competition.I also tried to analysed their Facebook Ads ( Facebook audience Insights),Emails ( Owletter) and Owler ( To understand their business).All these things helped to understand what they communicate to their target users, what keywords they use and who are their target audience and their interests.
Please see this slide where I have documented Jobs to be Done,Competitor Analysis ( One Secondary Competitor) and much more.
Primary Competitors
There are no Direct/Primary competitors
Secondary Competitors
These are the products that enable Mobile ordering at the airport.So they may become our primary competitors if they expand their business to the inflight ordering business.
https://getgrab.com/
https://www.loungebuddy.com/
https://atyourgate.com/
Tertiary Competitors
Swiggy and Zomato
They might build a B2C king of system for In-flight ordering as they already have a lot of users and their data with them.Ideate
Feature Synthesis
Feature Prioritization
User Stories
As a Passenger , I want to order my favourite food in flight so that I can enjoy the travel and food
As an In-charge of Inflight food ordering service, I want to track all the orders and deliver the right orders to right customers at right time.
These are two main group of users and their user story
Feature Prioritizations
We cannot develop the entire product at start so first we will be launching the MVP ( Minimum Viable Product ) we the features that are mandatory to solve the problem of in-flight food ordering.I have used the value vs complexity matrix method to prioritise the features.Some of the features that are mandatory include customer support ,terms and conditions and help information.
Value represent how the particular feature will be useful for customers and the Complexity represents how much efforts it will take for delivering the feature ( Designing, Development, Testing and deploying into production).
User Flow Diagram
Onboarding and Sign-up
Main User Flow
Wireframes
In the above Image as every ticket will have a QR code ( Prioritizing Login with QR as it’s faster and helpful for users)
In the above Wireframe ( It has most features as a Normal food ordering app and Let’s ask the questions what should be unique in the In-flight food ordering app and how should it differ )
Rethinking things in
1) Do we really need a search feature in a in-flight food ordering app ?
No,Because there will not be lot of options like there will limited number of space and operations to Store and prepare Food.
2) So here in the above wireframe when we give freedom to fill the time the food can arrive can lead to problems?
As a Result when multiple users put multiple times like when the food can arrive there will be lack of number of operations people in the cabin crew and they might get irritated as a result can decrease the Customer Experience.
So here we are bringing the concept of Slots where in the app while ordering they can tell in what slot they want their food to arrive at their seat and each slot can accommodate limited number of orders.Here are the wireframes after rethinking
High fidelity UI Design Expectation
Tech Stack
We can use React Native or Flutter as we are going to build an hybrid app ( Android and IOS and Web App for Dashboard for order tracking)
Based on my conversation with developers ( Both App and Web Developers ).
It is advantageous to go with React native for building this product
As It supports Offline Features and has a huge community and lot of open source libraries compared to flutter ( Which is like 3 Years old only ). As we are going to develop the app in react native it is also easy for us to develop the Web app in React which will be used by the flight in-charge for the Food department. For Orders dashboard we will use Apexcharts which is an open-source charts library.
For Backend we will use Firebase because It will help us to develop faster.Based on the developer’s decision we can go with Firebase or MongoDB or any other database.
Product Releases
App Version 1 ( Minimum Viable Product )
This Version of the app will be launched in the first 6 Months time and will have all the necessary feature t order foo in Flight
- Onboarding and Splash Screens
- Sign up and Authentication
- User Interface basic version
- Search with basic Filters
-Ability to Provide what time the food should arrive
- Payment Integrations
App Version 2
- API Integration with Affiliate partners ( KFC , Dominos ).This will enable our customers to earn a second source of income and also helping passengers to taste their favourite food during Flight travels.
- Add Ratings Reviews and Comments
- UI Improvements
- Customer Feedback or Bugs reported will be fixed
App Version 3
- AI based Food Recommendations
App Version 4
- Loyality Points
- Adding Affiliate Partner
App version 5
- Personalisation and Custom Branding of the App ( This Feature release can be prioritised based on customer’s need and Revenue generated )
- Wifi based Login ( As soon as they connect to the Flight’s Wifi It automatically shows the Items available in that catering service. This is done using Intranet and Wifi Protocol )
User Adoption and Measuring Success
Key Performance Indicators
These are the KPI’s with which we are going to measure how success looks like
Total Number of Orders
Total Number of Users
Total users rating and reviewing food products
Total transactions ( Debit Card,Credit Card and UPI Transactions )
Average Profit Per Delivery
Number Of Support Tickets
Churn Rate
Customer Life Time Value
Monthly Active Users
Number of Loyal Users
Number of Repeating orders
User Adoption Startegies
- Focus on Continuous Onboarding
2. Focus on the Customer Funnel ( User Journey )
3) Can Also Try Pirate Funnel ( To acquire the first set of users )
Business Model
How are we going to make money?
So here we are building SaaS food ordering app as a service for in-flight food ordering.We will sell to the Flight Businesses.
Pricing will vary based on Plans and Features
So If many customers requested the same feature we can plan to build it.
Best UX Practices to be followed
Please refer this slide for building this product with great user experience
It was really an awesome journey in building this product case study.Learnt a lot from talking with users understanding their pain points, building personas and much more.