GRUBHUB
Designing the Products that Make Grubhub Run
Grubhub is the nation's leading online and mobile food ordering company dedicated to connecting hungry diners with local takeout restaurants The company’s online and mobile ordering platforms allow diners to order from more than 85,000 takeout restaurants in over 1,600 U.S. cities and London. Every order is supported by the company’s 24/7 customer service teams, and Grubhub has offices in Chicago, New York and London.
I managed teams responsible for the design of bespoke products that supported internal Grubhub users within the Care, Restaurant Sales & Administration, and Delivery Operations departments. The tools my teams designed provide a solid foundation for the company and enable Grubhub’s rapid growth and market acceleration year over year.
Delivery Operations
Order Volume Forecasting
The order volume forecasting service within Grubhub’s Delivery Operations Center allows market managers to accurately forecast the number of orders for the coming week in a given market on a half hourly basis. This is a key tool for creating the weekly driver schedule which ensures enough couriers are on the road to meet the needs of our customers without paying for resources that are not needed.
My team’s task was to take a complicated workflow consisting of multiple spreadsheets and applications and simplify it into a single interface with multiple views to provide market managers with the flexibility they need to do their jobs and visibility into the data they need to do it well.
PROCESS
Discovery • Process Diagramming • Ideation • Wireframe Prototype • Usability Testing • Refinement • Visual Design • Micro-animation • Dev Support
Original Tool
Audit of Original Experience
Wireframe
Interaction Documentation
FINAL DESIGN
A process that used to involve multiple complex spreadsheets, 7 steps, and 4 different tools is now incorporated into one intuitive, easy-to-use screen that enables market managers to move quicker with increased visibility to make more accurate forecasts.
RESULTS
Over 150 hours of work saved per week which increased exponentially as Grubhub expanded delivery network and provided a foundation for scaling not possible with spreadsheets.
Corporate Care
Line Item Adjustments
A large portion of Grubhub’s business comes from corporate clients that use the corporate platform to place large group orders, as well as, provide meal perks to their employees. Our white glove support service for these clients is a key component of the product’s value proposition. In order to properly care for these clients we needed to augment the current Corporate Care tool with the ability to access each menu item in an individual order to easily and accurately offer refunds along with bringing up a restaurant’s menu to quickly add items to an order.
My team’s goal was to design this feature within our current Care tool to decrease agent friction, improve financial reporting for our clients and lay the groundwork for future shared cart group order functionality.
PROCESS
Discovery • Stakeholder Interviews • Process Diagramming • Ideation • Prototyping • Usability Testing • Revisions • Final Designs • Dev Support
FINAL DESIGN WITH ANNOTATIONS
Internal User Type
Defining & Mapping Internal Users
I was asked to lead a new Grubhub User Type team and create basic understanding and definition around Grubhub’s internal users, their workflows, and tools. As Grubhub continued to grow rapidly, we needed a better understanding of our internal users in order to optimize their toolkits and eventually have less people service more markets.
PROCESS
Discovery • Shadowing • Mapping roles to workflows and toolkits • Identifying similarities and differences among sub-types • Strategic POV • Shareout
RESULTS
Classification of three sub-user types: Care, Restaurant Operations and Delivery Operations each with their own motivations, workflows, and ways of using existing internal products. By mapping them in this way we were able to see connections, redundancies, opportunities to streamline workflows and toolkits, along with informing product roadmaps and better positioning Grubhub’s foundation for continued expansion.
Credits: Designers: Keith O’Sullivan, Anjana Thirumalai, Shane Sweeney | Researcher: Henry Birdseye