Sometimes hiding complexity is not a good option
Bolt Food app did a major change with interesting repercussions
If you ordered from Bolt Food lately you may have noticed that we recently changed the way your active orders are shown .
Previously we were trying to abstract away from the detail and only set expectations and give the user a sense of progress. But as our understanding of the business grew we changed our approach completely.
Food delivery is one of the most complex realtime marketplaces you will find (e-commerce has comparable complexity, but is not realtime and can tolerate delays in hours if not in days). It entails a three-sided marketplace and requires high precision in timing from both restaurants and couriers to deliver the freshly cooked meals straight to your door.
Such complexity comes hand in hand with high potential for mistakes: a restaurant can be late or early making food, we might not have a courier nearby, a courier might pick up the wrong order or a restaurant may mix up the order altogether. We certainly try to remove as many errors as possible with clear UX for all parties and some technological magic, but the sheer complexity of the system means that there is still a higher opportunity for error than e.g. ride hailing.
So we decided that instead of abstracting away from the detail we will give the users the full picture — what is happening in the restaurant and with the courier every step of the way, who is late and how much, when every previous action was completed and which are still left. We also removed the cute animations (sigh!), and put full details on the map to give additional sense of what is happening with the order.
The goal of the change is that by giving the users full transparency and a higher degree of control, we’ll reduce anxiety on what is happening with the order, allow cancelling clearly messed up ones and help users provide good feedback for the restaurant and the couriers, thus raising the level of quality long-term.
P.S. I’d like to thank Pavel Zubarev who is the author of this glorious new design!
Loved the key insight of this blog post. If you're solving a complex problem, show it to increase the perceived value.
Totally agree, considering the significant order volumes (especially on Friday evenings, game nights, etc) it would impossible for all the orders to get delivered on time in spite of best efforts. Feature like this will provide customers visibility of their order status and whilst she / he may not be happy that their order is going to be delayed, they are at least being made aware (proactively) and saves them the hassle of reaching (call/ msg/email) out to your customer service team for order status. From an organisation’s perspective, this will also significantly reduce the cost of failure as you will not require as many people in your customer services department. Many thanks for sharing this article JK.