Experiencing mood on Swiggy
After digging deep, in all those nasty comments and reviews posted online by angsty swiggy users, my task was to come up with a problem. How simple it sounds, it was important to not get influenced by biased opinions and stick to the brief. A brief which I self initiated which goes like this :
Brief :
To come up with a design oriented and logical solution for a user faced problem.
How did I come up with the problem?
On the basis of my online research I decided to note down, most commonly faced problems which ranged from extra delivery charges, wrong food delivery till small application bugs. That’s when I came across Swiggy POP which basically caters to all these problems and yet I was back to basics. Is it really that difficult to find problems? Right then I thought :
Me being a Swiggy user, why not to take a problem which personally irked me. Something I often experienced while ordering. That’s what gave birth to ‘ Yaar ye Khane ka mood nai hai' ( I don’t feel like eating this)
Problem statement
How can an application help us to empathize and untangle the messy relationship between our mood and the food?
A lot of times, we become indecisive about what to eat because we couldn’t resonate with the type of food we want. This leads to long hours of search in finding the right kind of food, which becomes difficult especially for students staying away from their “Ghar ka khana”
My role in this project
As its a self initiated project, but at the same time, I did not want to design in isolation. Collaboration is the ultimate key, but I had to challenge myself as well and successfully complete this project alone to check my full potential. Thus I did ended up talking to many Swiggy users I know of. Also took a general poll on Instagram, to see opinion of people regardless of their food delivery app.
How did I come up with the proposed Solution?
Personality quizzes are my favorite pastimes. My inspiration comes from the visual quiz I recently took. The graphics were so well thought. Giving a different experience to people while the application collects the data from them gave rise to “Mood analysis quiz”
But why moods?
In 2020, according to WGSN report, Designers will focus on adding soul to technology, by empathizing and making it more human.
As emotional wellness becomes a buzzword in beauty, brands are tapping into consumers' moods and feelings using artificial intelligence technology combined with emotional intelligence and human interaction is the trend.
But the details of the relationship between foods and moods end up being a little contradictory and a lot complicated. You might eat if you feel happy but at times eat to change your current mood.
Categorising the moods
The insights which I received from the earlier study helped me to come with the conclusion i.e Everyone has their meal type and mood plays a vital role. This is with respect to our target audience. There are times when we do feel like surprising ourselves but nothing really goes as perfect pyaaz ke pakode and garam chai on a rainy day for me atleast. Hence I categorised these situational moody foody types based on my over all observations and research.
After studying the routine of the user it helped me to categorise what kind of situational moods a student is most likely to experience. To give an example of the this will work I came up with few illustrative examples :
How does this work?
Let’s take an example, Tina wants to order food from the app. She goes through the following steps
01. Tina feeds the data of her mood food choices which pops up on the screen as soon as she open the app.
02. She answers all the questions which won’t take more than two minutes.
03. Later whenever Tina craves food, she just have to open the app and type the keyword in the search bar and the result will get filtered according to her preferences.
04. If tina eats biryani, when she feels like treating herself she would just type ‘Treat me” in the search bar and the top biryani restaurants will be shown at the top.
05. If Tina ever feels like exploring she can anytime go back to normal way of using the app.
Soup could be sick meal for one but comfort food for the other, so the formula also keeps a check on your ordering history. This is completely personalised experience and not a general statistics. Hence,
Your current emotion + your ordering history = Top food options
Marketing campaign
I came across the interesting Swiggy report 2019 about top food dishes, which could also be showcased as a fact on the app while people successfully complete the order.
“ You’re not the only biryani lover eating at this hour, 17 types of biryani are ordered on Swiggy every minute XD”
Share your #MOFO #MymoodFood on social media. But if you think MOFO means something else then well it perfectly goes with Swiggy’s WhattheFalooda advertisement campaign, where you replace swear words with something more kind ;)
Is this best solution?
Technology is no more just functional but also focuses on empathy and emotional intelligence. I wouldn’t say this is the best because there is always a scope for improvement, while I did come across Uber Eats ongoing research where they are trying to collaborate with ‘Affectiva’ an emotional features scanning AI, to scan facial expressions.
But to start with, an Indian food delivery application trying to empathise and understand the user just like our Indian mothers is a great addition to have, don’t you think?
Conclusion
People intrigue me and so do their problems, I had so much fun to complete this project in a three day sprint. I’m aware there is lot which could be added as learning never really stops. Adding emotion to the design is very important for me, this is well my amateur attempt at doing so ;)
