Improved operational insights

As a restaurant partner, Deliveroo offers an online platform known as Restaurant Hub for them to check on their operational data, invoices and manage their teams. Just as I joined the company, the tech team had finished an API integration that meant access to more reliable data, and more data at that, which gave us a great opportunity to take on an improved insights project.

We found that the problem had two levels:

There simply wasn’t enough awareness of the Restaurant Hub across partners. They didn’t know what it was, or how to access it.
The data they did have access to was presented in graphs that confused them more than helped them.

We then created a strategy to tackle this issues in different layers: through a rebranding of the platform, so we had a common name to call it (it was called different things internally by different teams), and through providing actionable data to partners. I will concentrate on the latter.

Our objective was to offer innovative data solutions to our restaurant partners to empower them to make data driven decisions.

The whole process took 4 weeks, and it consisted of various working sessions with the content designer to define our content strategy, crit sessions with the team once or twice a week, constant touch points with the project PM to prioritise what we could ship faster, and with the developers to not only understand technical feasibility but also to create a sense of ownership of the initiative across the board.

What we ended up with was data insights that allowed partners to skim through and get a sense of where they stood, but also give them the ability to drill down into the data for more in-depth insights.

For this project, it was super important to weigh in when using graphs to aid the understanding of the data was going to be appropriate. During user research, we saw that what customers wanted was a quick, consumable status for their operations, not to have to decode charts. That’s why the approach I recommended was one that focused on coloured labels that told the story of each stat quickly, rather than focusing on the explorations below, where they came associated with a data visualisation.

In those opportunities we identified, I worked directly on 3 features that are now live:

Enabling partners to reset their password for their live orders themselves
Creating a webform they can fill to open a customer support case
Enabling them to edit their open hours

It adds up to restaurants being able to be more self-reliant, and gaining more control of their operations. There is a lot more to be done, but out of those the one with the highest impact is editing their own open hours.

Up until now, if a restaurant wanted to close for a day, open a little later or even open sooner, they simply couldn’t do it on the go. They had to send an email to customer support, and wait for those changes to be made manually on their behalf. Less than ideal. But now they can do all that themselves – effectively putting them on the road to more empowered self-management.