Making food browsing easier for 20m+ users
In 2022, GoJek rapidly scaled through experimentation, adding numerous features as the business expanded. But the outdated design system couldn’t keep pace, creating gaps in the overall experience. As a product designer on GoFood, I led the end-to-end revamp of the merchant profile for Southeast Asia’s largest food delivery platform.
+10%
Virgin user conversion
+2%
Session to booking
What is currently broken?
Understanding our current design
With exponential increases in volume and complexity, our once-fitting design framework grew increasingly outdated. Rigid and static interfaces led to cluttered flows overloaded with information. Research showed users felt bombarded and wanted more relevant, timely content. It became clear the experience needed an overhaul.
Doing an extensive audit
My first task was an exhaustive audit, mapping the full journey to uncover gaps. UX audit Workshops with cross-functional partners revealed pain points, even for internal super users. Checking journeys against core jobs-to-be-done highlighted failures in meeting user needs. Further ahead, we looked at our competitors to understand what they were doing better.
Some key pain points & gaps uncovered from these exercises are as below -
Messy layout and unclear information hierarchy
In all UX audit workshops, we received common feedback around the IA being unclear and the experience being very cluttered and confusing.
Reviews are useful but not very noticeable
Even though Reviews were a P1 datapoint for our users, It was not being visually differentiated from the other datapoints with lesser importance.
Savings through promos didn’t feel rewarding
CSAT satisfaction score for promo experience was only 3.5/5 even though it had the most weightage in terms of importance by user preference.
Users expect more data during menu exploration
Users pointed out in multiple FG discussions that the number of datapoints available per dish should be increased for faster decision making.
No space to showcase merchant content
Out of a sample size of 100, over 76 merchants had put up a marketing banner in place of their logo since there is no other place to surface it.
Repeat ordering experience was missing
18% of all reorders were placed from the reorder tab on home after the user has checked out the same merchant’s profile page, in the same session.
Understanding our users
With the core problems spaces clarified, we committed to deeply understanding our users through ethnographic research and data analysis. This ultimately defined 5 key user segments that would frame solution exploration.
From this study, we knew that Social Eater and Reasonable indulgers are the biggest chunk of users on our platform. To further enhance our understanding of how the general trends would affect the industry and user behaviour, we also conducted an in depth trends analysis of the Online Food Delivery marketplace which revealed some interesting insights :
#1
Inflation is going to have an impact and nearly 50% of users would opt for affordable choices.
#2
Users who eat healthy meals are seen to nearly double up their avg. general AOV purchase.
#3
The purchases in today’s time are often impulsive decisions driven by craving.
Defining what to solve for
Synthesizing insights revealed core problem statements around information discovery, personalization and promotions. These provided a complete view of the problem statement.
Information
Improve merchant & food discovery experience that supports faster customer decision-making
#1
Personalisation
Create a personalised and content-rich experience and make ordering a social experience.
#2
Promotions
Improve promo discovery & redemption experience while ensuring increased perceived value
#3
Explore, Explore, Explore
The ideation phase entailed the exploration of diverse concepts and ideas for the GoFood redesign. Our goal was to encapsulate the visual, experiential, and interactive dimensions of the new GoFood app. To facilitate this creative process, we organized a two-day ideation event named Design Jam-A-Thon, where designers, researchers, and product teams collaborated to ideate on the problem.
In this event, I actively contributed to a group dedicated to reshaping the promo experience. Together, we crafted an end-to-end flow addressing identified pain points in promotions. Our collaborative efforts were also recognised with the Best Innovation Award.
The most probable solution
Armed with the insights gathered from previous ideation sessions, we dived into experimentation at our drawing board. Through multiple cycles of iterations and feedback, we honed our solution. Every step was a collaborative effort with our DLS teams, ensuring alignment with our Aloha design language system. Simultaneously, our partnership with research teams facilitated extensive usability testing, ensuring a flawlessly polished design that caters seamlessly to user needs.
Key Improvements
The journey of finding a solution is an ongoing expedition, and I'd like to share ours. Below, I present the solution divided into distinct aspects that significantly enhance the overall user experience.
Defining a clear visual layout
Prior to delving into component-level details, the initial focus was on streamlining and organizing the screen layout for quick section differentiation. The previous merchant profile design lacked cohesion, with no clear separation or hierarchy among elements. The new design addresses this by introducing a muted background and elevating components, enhancing contrast, and improving scanability.
With lesser elements on the screen, it becomes easier to scan and consume content
This also helped in pushing the menu upwards by freeing a lot of vertical area
Getting rid of what’s not needed
After settling on the layout, a careful review of each datapoint was conducted to decide its relevance on the merchant profile screen. A lot of redundant or unnecessary datapoints were removed from the screen to decrease information overload.
Giving reviews, the respect it deserves
Past research and user studies emphasized the significance of social proof through ratings and reviews for quicker decision-making. In previous designs, these vital elements were buried among less crucial information, hindering user accessibility. In the new design, priority was given to showcasing ratings immediately after the restaurant name, aiming to instill confidence and aid informed decision-making upon opening the restaurant page.
To empower dish choices through reviews, we also started surfacing SKU-level ratings. To enhance visibility of reviews, we introduced the InScroll reviews snippet that also helps in breaking the monotony of a long menu scroll.
We added picture support to reviews, making them more lively and engaging compared to the old text-based format. Also, we made big changes to how the reviews page looks and works.
Making savings more humanized, less mechanical
The previous promo bar occupied excessive vertical space, providing unclear information to users. Its static nature limited surfacing only two offer details, with vague applicability terms. To address this, we revamped the promo bar, utilizing micro interactions to maximize screen space. The redesigned bar now displays one offer at a time, scrolling at intervals. The updated copy emphasizes essential voucher details—offer, criteria, sponsor—optimizing screen space while enhancing comprehension.
Furthermore, To improve the campaigns and promotions experience, we revamped the promo redemption process for a more gratifying user interaction. By refining the copy and communication, the new personalized messaging informs users of the items needed to unlock the next offer, ensuring clearer comprehension within a reduced vertical space. Streamlining the checkout CTA involved removing redundant information, focusing solely on essential datapoints. The enhanced redemption experience features a delightful animation upon unlocking an offer, enhancing user gratification and the perception of affordability. Subsequently, the copy transitions seamlessly to highlight the next best offer.
Simpler, more gratifying promo callouts
Old
New
Inspiring more informed decisions
The older expereicene of browsing dishes used to be very basic, there were only a few datapoints available to the user, and those datapoints were static in nature. The page used to have only single image, name, description and price. These datapoints were in no way insufficient for making a decision, but they didn’t help a lot. To solve this, we reimagined the dish card and the related interactions. We deeply looked at what important datapoints could be beneficial to the user for making an informed decision and implemented those. We also looked at what all possible datapoints can be added in the future and designed the dish card to be scalable for future cases.
Let merchants reach out directly to users
Currently, GoFood offers a one-dimensional experience where users browse, select, and proceed to checkout. However, research indicates a desire for more merchant information. Merchants faced limitations in showcasing offline campaigns, leading to reduced visibility and struggles with new dish promotions within limited image space.
Some had to even resort to hacks like the putting their banner as profile pictures. Examples below 👇🏼
From past researches, we also know that ability to customise the merchant page is a P1 Delighter for merchants. To address these, we introduced the storefront feature, providing a dedicated space on the restaurant page for a physical storefront-like experience. Accessible through a swipe-down, this empowers merchants with customizable tools, fostering a stronger user-merchant connection and enhancing overall user experience for informed decision-making.
Helping our merchants express themselves better
Storefront v0.1
After solidifying the initial concept, we promptly ran a concept test with a group of merchants to evaluate the feasibility and gauge the need for this feature.
Insights from Concept Test
Acceptance
Merchants liked the concept by asked for easier tools for creation
Interest
Linkage to merchant’s social media was most liked feature of all
Audience
Merchants with younger owners were most likely to adopt quickly
Hence, guided by the concept test, we proceeded to assess our primary target audience through segment sizing. With validation from the test indicating merchant demand and willingness to pay if the value proposition is strong, we initiated the feature plan. This paves the way for a completely new monetization avenue for the company.
Some more improvements
Introducing Reorder
Users can now reorder their previously liked dishes from the merchant profile directly, without the need of going to the dedicated reordering page from the homescreen. This aims at elevating the experience for loyal MTU users.
Dish attribute level filters
Users can now filter and sort the otherwise long and boring menus. We are planning to go a step ahead and allow users to be able to filter even on the basis of cooking type or nutritional value, enhanncing the experience for all.
Non-intrusive suggestions
The similar dishes carousel now is hidden behind an additional tap, users would see the list of suggested dishes in collapsed form first and they can then expand it into a full carousel if they are interested in those dishes.
Improved menu interaction
The menu interaction has been revamped with a focus on maximising the vertical size used while not compromising on single hand usage. Each item on the new menu can be easily accessed using a single finger interaction.
What did we ship?
Life is not always a hunky dory story. After all of us working on the redesign for close to 6 months, we found ourselves in a tough spot. GoJek at that time was dealing with financial struggle and there was a huge pressure for profitablity. Thus, management decided to shelf this project for some time and foucs on other things at hand.
We combed to find the most critical improvement, requiring least effort but could deliver maximum impact. We then decided to shelf everything else and only ship dish level ratings, since the data was already there to power this, and wouldve required a very minor dev effort to push ahead.
Impact Generated
+10%
Virgin User Conversion
+2%
Session to Booking Conversion
Key Learnings
Small changes can deliver big impact under constraints
Because of business/financial constraints, many of the more ambitious features could not be shipped immediately. The team focused on features that were low effort but high value — for example, introducing dish‐level ratings (leveraging already available data) that didn’t require heavy development. That alone moved key metrics (virgin user conversion +10%, session to booking +2%).
KEY TAKEAWAY
When resources/time are limited, identify “quick wins” : improvements that can be implemented readily but have visible impact, so that some value can be delivered even if full version can't be shipped.
Understand trends to create future ready products
Beyond solving today’s problems, the team actively studied broader shifts — like rising food inflation, growing demand for healthy options, and the psychology of impulsive ordering. These insights helped guide which features would remain relevant and competitive over time, rather than designing only for short-term wins.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Embedding trend analysis into product strategy ensures that what you build not only works now but also positions the product to stay useful, competitive, and resilient in the future.
Plaese view on desktop for now.
Mobile version is coming soon.
Thanks For Reading
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