Koin Project — Improving Food Ordering Usability

Koin is a community platform service for Korea University of Technology and Education students, offering various services such as local store information, transportation, timetables, and more. Among these, I improved the usability of the local store service, which provides information about nearby stores where students can order food.

Inconvenient Ordering Process

While the local store information was well-organized, users I met during campus life still found it difficult to find the stores and menu information they wanted and to place orders.

Local Store Screen Before Improvement

Hypothesis and KPI Setting

Hypothesis Setting

'If users can quickly find the information they want, the time taken to place an order will be reduced.'

KPI Setting

Total time taken for users to click the call button on the local store page (task completion time)

KPI Measurement

Using Firebase tools, we set events and collected user data for about a month, considering the following:

Excluded cases where users moved to another service (or main) page from the local store page.
Included the time taken to move between detailed pages.
Calculated the final result as the average of all user measurements.

Adding Firebase Events

Analysis of Similar Services

We experienced the food ordering process of similar delivery apps, analyzed their strengths and weaknesses, and differentiated features to refer to for service improvement.

Baedal Minjok

Strengths

Provides labels like coupons and packaging on the restaurant list for easy information checking.

Weaknesses

The same restaurant appears multiple times on the list, causing confusion during selection.

Differences

Offers separate tabs for packaging and visit orders to provide services responsive to the COVID-19 situation.

Yogiyo

Strengths

Increases accessibility by placing discounted restaurants at the top of the list.

Weaknesses

The UI for filtering the list is small, and too many options can inconvenience users.

Differences

Easily helps users find desired restaurants by categorizing various store themes on the home screen.

Two Types of Users

Before improving the service, we categorized users of the local store service into two types and considered what experiences each user needed.

Users with a Specific Store in Mind

Users who want to quickly find and order food from a specific store.

Users Browsing Without a Specific Store in Mind

Users who browse various stores without a specific store in mind and want to order food.

Store Search (For Users with a Specific Store in Mind)

For users with a specific store in mind, quickly obtaining desired store information is crucial. Therefore, we added a search feature that allows direct and intuitive navigation. When users click on store search, they move to a separate search page with real-time search support to quickly find the desired store.

Added Search Function

Store Recommendations (For Users Browsing Without a Specific Store in Mind)

For users without a specific store in mind, it’s important to browse various stores comfortably while finding the desired menu. The improved detailed page includes a [See More Menu] button to partially collapse the menu introduction and recommend other stores in the same category, shortening the browsing flow.

Added Store Recommendations

Flyer Images

Users wanted to see flyers that provided intuitive and organized menu information. To address this, we collected flyer images from nearby stores with club members and provided a UI for checking these separately from menu information. Users can click on thumbnails to view larger images, with zoom-in and zoom-out functionality.

Added Flyer Tab

Store Open Status

Sometimes users navigated to a store’s detailed page only to find it wasn’t open yet, requiring them to return to the previous screen. To eliminate this unnecessary flow, we displayed 'Preparing' and sorted such stores at the bottom of the list based on the current time.

Added Store Open Status Indicator

Call Button

Users had to scroll down to the bottom to view the menu and then scroll back up to the top to click the call button. To alleviate this inconvenience and allow faster ordering, we fixed the call button as a floating action button at the bottom of the screen.

Changed Call Button

Final Design After Improvement

We updated and deployed the app with the final design improvements, including store search, store recommendations, flyer images, store open status, and the call button.

Hypothesis Verification

To verify our hypothesis (If users can quickly find the information they want, the time taken to place an order will be reduced), we observed the KPI (task completion time) before and after the improvements. As a result, the time taken for users to place food orders significantly decreased by about 44%, validating our hypothesis.