Hangry to Happy 

A journey to make Subway Faster

UX Case Study

Project Overview

This case study is based on real life experience, which inpired me to explore solutions to improve the online ordering experience of users like me and you.

My Role

As a UX researcher, I was involved in empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing the design solution to make online ordering a positive experience for customers.

Tools

Project Details

April-July 2022

Project completed for IxDF 
UX Fundamentals Bootcamp

Project Background

Subway is an American multi national fast food restaurant franchise with 58.1%  stores  in the United States. Also It is the largest fast food chain worldwide, with 33,749 restaurants . In 2015, it ranked #3 on the "Top Global Franchises" list, and #1 as the "Fastest Growing Franchise". About 20% of american families eat at subway annually. Its functional structure is to provide quick food services to people.

With progress in technologies now there is an app for everything.The subway app allows customers to order food online. But the process is repetitive and time-consuming. With this research study, the main aim is to find out UX solutions to fix and improve the usability and efficiency of the app.


The Problem

Subway mobile app does not allow the customers to save multiple foods as favorites, which makes the customer go through the ordering sequence repeatedly that takes more time to order food. This makes the customers feel frustrated.

The Solution

Objectives and Goals

My objective is to get to know my users needs, by connecting with them to know their feelings, perspectives, frustrations and pain points they face when they order food online. This information  helped me to device possible solutions to fix the issues with the UX design solution so that the customer can accomplish the task efficiently.

My  goal is to make the user experience more efficient, usable, and accessible and develop credibility for the product thereby increasing its desirability.


Design Process

I followed the 5 stage thinking of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the d.school). Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases:

Accumulate information gathered during the Empathize stage. Analyze observations to define the core problems which are called problem statements.Create personas to connect with people keeping your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.

Alternative ways to solve a problem

Aim to identify the best possible solution for each problem

Test your design solutions, iterate, alter to refine and try testing again.

Deliverables

Competitor Analysis

I compared the mobile apps of the direct and indirect competitors of subway  to identify features that can take subway to the level of its competitors.

  Subway Offers

  Subway does not offer


Live Help Chat and Ordering ahead of is out of the scope of my project

Proto Personas

Proto personas were developed based on fictional and real-life characters, developed on the basis of empathy, compassion and the needs of people. Although these personas are not real, they are based on data and facts obtained through real-life interviews, surveys, and other forms of user research.

Story Boarding

Is a useful technique to empathize with the personas, getting them into a story or actual situation which is helpful in gaining insights about how they feel, how they think, what they say and what they do when they use the product. Here I have used my Proto personas to create a story which describes them into a situation. This process is essential to be in their shoes.


Customer journey Map

Customer Journey Maps for the proto persona help to track the actions, thoughts feeling in a time wise manner when they are using your product which is under research

Empathy Map

The empathy maps are important as they give insights about their mind and thinking process.

User Surveys

Semi-structured qualitative interviews are great to empathize with your users as they can give you an in-depth understanding of peoples’ values, perceptions, and experience.They allowed me to ask specific questions while remaining open to participants’ points of view. The questions were based on three aspects of the participants.


The interviewees were required two simple tasks.All the data was extracted in the form of transcripts to make a affinity map of the findings to identify the common issues that the interviewees faced during the process of ordering through the subway app.

Purpose

To help the designer by carefully identifying any logical , functional issues with the ordering process through the subway app and comment on things they liked, things they did not like as much, any questions they had, and new ideas/suggestions they had, to improve the procedure.


Findings






Information Architecture

IA is the key to find shortcuts as a solution because they give us  insight about how each page is connected to another and helped me understand the repeatitive patterns.

User Flows

Userflows helped me understand all the steps that a user has to go through to accomplish a task. I found that the existing user flow was a repeatitive process while the new proposed user flow allowed parallel ordering for multiple orders hence shortening the procedure.

Sketches

Wireframes

Usability testing 

Objective: To make multiple orders, save multiple favorite foods/account for quick and efficient ordering through the mobile Sunway App.

A usability test was performed as a part of this UX Fundamental  boot camp, where participants were asked to perform a simple task working throught the prototype file in figma to identify any visual and logical issues in the design.


Tasks/ participant- 


The data was gathered and affinity mapping was done and the data was recorded in the feed back capture grid.


Insights


Final Screens

Challenges

Failures

Future Scope