teatree design
SARA EIDELSHTEIN
Bringing food delivery to the hospitality sector
Hotels want to provide more value to their guests when they don't offer on-site restaurant options. Our solution allows guests to make the most out of their visit by seamlessly ordering food to the hotel from any nearby restaurant.
My role & responsibilities
SR. PRODUCT DESIGNER
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Define product goals
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Understand potential and current challenges from existing dining behavior at MVP pilot properties
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Define personas
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Design user experience
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Partnered with product team lead and a team of 4 engineers to build the mobile solution
The problem
Hotels without dining
Many hotels offer limited or no on-site dining options. Often times only a limited breakfast. In order to offer more services to their guests, they would like to partner with a food delivery company in order to give them unique hotel-branded food delivery option with no added delivery costs.
Define our users
Hotel guests
The hotel properties that offer limited services (limited or zero on-site restaurants and food services) have specific clientele in urban areas. I researched the main behaviors of these guests to understand how to build a user experience that solves for their needs.
We had built a hospitality solution for resorts and full-service hotels previously, but the user base for this solution was quite different. Usually a vacationing family or group. Ordering behaviors were quite different than those coming to stay in urban hotels. Our core user we discovered was typically a business-person staying for a short time and most of the day at work-related events.
Defining our core user type
Easy onboarding
A branded experience
Through various marketing materials around the hotel, we prompted guests to scan a QR code. New users will be directed to download the app while existing users will simply open the app to the welcome screen. The welcome screen is a co-branded experience, further relaying the hotel guests specific offering.
For those with geolocation services turned on for their devices, simply opening the app will bring them to the hotel branded experience.
Hotel guest scans QR code
Opens to hotel welcome screen
Starts browsing with hotel branding
Make life easier
Auto-populate hotel details and delivery instructions
Most hotel guests wouldn't know the address of their hotels. In order to get users browsing nearby restaurants quickly and easily, we auto-populated the name and address in the search bar and added delivery instructions for delivery drivers to know where to drop off orders at the hotel.
Home screen with hotel details
Checkout with hotel delivery details
Give hotel guests a reason to order-in and become lifelong app users
Free delivery & premium membership
In order to incentivize hotel guests to order-in, we offered them free delivery through our premium subscription plan. They will get one month free of our premium subscription which will ensure their continued use of the app post-hotel stay.
Grubhub+ offer upon entering the app
$0 delivery confirmed at checkout
Further explorations
Seamless sign-ins
We explored building a more visually smooth onboarding and sign-in experience by redesigning the visual experience to be more consistent within the 3 onboarding screens. Due to a tight deadline, we needed to use mostly existing design components for the pilot.
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Pilot success
30 properties/30 days
We rolled out a MVP of our hotel solution to 30 properties in urban centers. After 30 days the results were unanimous: hotel guests order at a greater value than our average marketplace users and continue ordering post stay with our premium subscription.
Through the limited service solution, we were able to double daily average from 30 to 60 across pilot properties orders per property and increase average order value from $40 to $50.
What did we learn
Opportunities
Based on the data collected from the pilot we saw some clear opportunities to expand our offering:
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Experiment with flow variations: We saw a drop off in app sign ups and dismissal of the Grubhub+ offer with no clear reason. We added multiple placements of the Grubhub+ offer in the flow for those that initially dismissed it and allow users to sign up later in the ordering flow in order to reduce friction
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Customized home screen content: Users ordered on average mostly in the evenings and specific cuisine types, focusing our home page carousels to tailor to these ordering trends would make the experience easier for our users
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Convenience: users looked for convenience items and hotels wanted to offer special grocery and convenience items for their guests items
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Our premium membership isn't seeing as much retention as we hoped. We want to delve deeper into this and follow up with users to understand what's missing for them
Simple improvements
Boosting GH+ signup
After reviewing user feedback that the GH+ offer was not very clear, I worked together with our copywriter to see how we could improve the copy on the offer bottom sheet. By simply tweaking the text, we were able to increase GH+ signups by 23%
Designing post-MVP
Design thinking
After a year with minimal improvements to the hospitality solution and growing adoption of this product, together with my PM, we formulated a plan for user research and a design thinking workshop for our team:
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User research in the form of email surveys to gather quantitative and qualitative data around our UX and those of competitors
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Design thinking workshop with stakeholders across the organization to define opportunity areas and develop 3-4 solid ideas to implement
Property management
What's next
The success of the pilot led to a large scale contract of 2,200 properties and more hotel brands. With a planned expansion to thousands more hotels across the United States.
Due to serious technical constraints in the current property onboarding process, it was clear we would need to migrate our solution to the Grubhub marketplace tech stack in order to scale. The current solution was too time-consuming, had limitations around speed and data, and was not built to sustain this influx of properties.
Property management for internal and external users
Hospitality management
Overview
Given the product-market fit for Limited Service, our main 2023 focus is to scale this business to 2500 properties with 11,000 more to come in 2024.
The Grubhub campus tech stack and backoffice tool has been used to set up and maintain hotel properties. It does not allow our team to scale to the projected amount of hotels or manage properties efficiently.
Moving forward we need to migrate to the marketplace stack in order to scale to the amount of hotels in the pipeline beyond 2023.
The primary focus of this tool is to allow our internal admins and hotel brand managers to easily create and edit properties to be activated on the Grubhub app hospitality experience, view reporting and insights around properties performance, and manage brands and users for these properties.
Brand/group setup
Dashboard and reporting
User management
