Give Me Some ZA: Improving Pizza Ordering

UX Research — Mobile

01 Background

ZA is an iOS app that uses AI-driven pizza bots to improve pizza ordering & delivery. Similar to Amazon’s fulfillment networks that house, process and deliver packages, our team designed a bot and vending machine that would combine & automate the three main steps for ‘za: (1) ordering, (2) cooking and (3) delivering.

How does ZA work?

Through the app, the ZA machine receives an order.
The machine cooks the pizza, and transfers it to the ZA pod for delivery.
Customers can track the pod and confirm delivery through the app.

Team & Roles

I worked on this project with Austin and Kat for our design class. We conducted user interviews and wireframing together. My role was industry research and final UI. Visuals was done by Austin, and Cat worked on the final InVision prototype.

02 Research

To design a solution to improve pizza ordering, we had to find out how people usually order pizza and why. Here is a summary of our research:

More people want to order online or through mobile, which can be costly to implement for mom-and-pop shops (Source)
50% of Domino’s sales comes from repeated orders using saved payment and delivery information (Source)
Younger consumers are looking for custom-made pizzas, and want to support businesses that are social-conscious (Source)

User Interviews

Who? Because the pizza ordering process not only touched the customer's side but also the pizza-maker and delivery side, we decided to interview pizza eaters, pizza owners and delivery drivers.

What? We also wanted to understand the motivations behind why people order pizza. We asked questions such as:
- What is your favorite pizza chain and why?
- Why do you order pizza vs. something else?
- Tell us about your most recent pizza order — how was your experience?

Where? We interviewed most people in-person. For those shorter on time, we conducted an online interview.

Interview Findings

In summary, users ordered pizza for 3 main reasons: (1) accessibility, (2) price and (3) taste.

Combining their pain points, we also concluded that there were too many points of contact during a pizza delivery — one person received the order, someone else made the pizza and another delivered & made the transaction.

• • •

“I don’t know who to call when someone messes up my order. Do I call the store? The driver? The cashier?””

03 Planning

Combining our research & interviews into a persona, we wanted a technology-driven solution for our millennial consumer that would consolidate + automate the 3 main steps of pizza deliveries (ordering, cooking, delivering).

Brainstorming

We thought of devices that combined these steps, and became inspired by vending machines, which are easy to use, self-automated and provide immediate gratification.

Knowing that pizza vending machines already existed, we wondered how to further automate deliveries, and came up with the idea of a delivery robot.

Finally, to be used in tandem with the vending machine and bot, we also created a mobile app that was minimalistic in its order choices and easily accessible via smartphone. Below is the planning stage for the mobile UI.