Product in Focus: Swiggy

Product in Focus is a series to acknowledge some great products available to us and what improvements or features could be added to them to make them even better.

The sixth product in this series is Swiggy.

Swiggy started in 2014 as an online food ordering and delivery platform. It has, since then, ventured into grocery delivery, Swiggy Genie, and meat delivery. Swiggy has a network of around 128,000 restaurants across 500 Indian towns and cities (as of September 2021) with around 20 million monthly active users.

I have been using this app for quite some time and I am convinced it has made me order food a lot more and has kept the glutton inside me satisfied.

However, being an ardent user of this app, I always have felt that there could be some improvements and features that could be added to this app to make the user experience better and more fulfilling.
For the simplicity of the blog, I will keep my views strictly on Swiggy’s food ordering and delivery feature.

Before proceeding, I must mention, that I am not affiliated with Swiggy & any of its verticals in any capacity, and the views for this article are strictly my own.

What Swiggy does best

1. Ordering food online made easy

With a plethora of restaurants, all arranged by cuisines, ratings and tiny but important factors such as “Healthy Food”, Swiggy has spoiled us with choices as well as the sheer comfort of ordering food with a few clicks.

2. Swiggy One Membership

With free deliveries and extra discounts on restaurants, the incentive to order food online has become much more than earlier. Users are tricked into feeling they don’t have to incur extra charges in the name of delivery and are happy to order in. The best part about the membership — its benefits are availed across all verticals of Swiggy (be it Instamart or Meat delivery).

3. Latest UI Revamp

With the latest design revamp of the app, Swiggy has made sure they are able to highlight all their verticals and drive growth in each of them. The new UX has made it even easier to navigate through the app, and understand each offering better.

Few reads:

• Swiggy’s Director of Design, very well encapsulated the thought behind the new design on their Linkedin post.
• PM School’s recent post decoded the design principles that are part of Swiggy’s revamped UI.

User Personas

Swiggy’s user personas can be defined broadly by 3 individuals:

1. The Splurgers

• These are the individuals that are the 20% of users for Swiggy contributing to 80% of their revenue.
• They are of the age group 25–40 years.
• They are either living alone, or in nuclear families in Tier 1/Tier 2 cities.
• They earn well and absolutely hate cooking food at home.
• They are usually the ones who order at least once in 15 days. They do not shy away from ordering from fancy restaurants or splurging a bit.

2. The Binge Orderers

• They are of the age group 15–25 years.
• They are in college right now, or have just started their first jobs.
• They are tech-savvy, and they want to order in, but, their Average Order Value remains low.
• They order the most, almost once a week, however, opt for cheaper options.

3. The Online Noobs

• These users fall in the age group of 40 years and above.
• They are less tech-savvy and have come to try Swiggy for their Instamart and Food Delivery feature.
• They order less, perhaps once in a month at most, that too from select few restaurants.

For the simplicity of this blog, our focus will be on The Splurgers.

Our Goal

To improve satisfaction and the Average Order Value of The Splurgers.
We know that this user persona can spend more, given they are provided with the right nudges.

Improvements & New Features’ Suggestions

1. Personalization with an Element of Surprise

With the amount of user data Swiggy must have collected since its inception, I am 100% sure they know users’ eating and splurging behaviour way more than other apps.

A feature like Netflix’s “Surprise Me”, backed up with users’ historical data, and hence building a cart with dishes/items from users’ favourite restaurant/favourite cuisine could work wonders. With nudges and offerings and recommendations to edit and modify the cart, this would reduce Choice Overload and time spent in making a decision, for users.

This feature would save users’ time, nudge them to order more with pre-built carts and save users from Choice Overload.

Different personalized carts can be shown to users, however, the right trade-off between too many choices and personalization to be taken care of. We would not want Choice Overload with too many pre-built carts as well.

The added benefit of this feature is that Swiggy can actually upsell to users with an increase in Average Order Value, since if customers are satisfied with a pre-made cart, Swiggy could nudge the user to order more than they actually would have planned to.

2. Subscriptions on Food Delivery

This is a feature especially useful for users living alone or relying on food ordering more than cooking food at home.
A subscription like on Amazon/Supr Daily wherein users can schedule the delivery of food at a particular time on particular days with extra benefits of super-fast deliveries, and fewer delivery charges (since Swiggy would be anticipating these orders) could make Swiggy and users’ life easier.

Subscriptions will make sure users stick to Swiggy app.

In case restaurants aren’t serviceable, Swiggy could provide a notification 30 mins before + calls from customer support making sure user is aware of the issue and can modify their order.

This feature can also ensure habitual ordering on Swiggy, and make these users more loyal. As this feature grows, Swiggy will be able to identify a few selected restaurants that are best suited for such subscriptions (restaurants who haven’t shut down, haven’t delayed/declined orders in the past etc.)

3. Online Delivery from Multiple Restaurants

There are times when user wants to order the main course from one restaurant but ice cream to go along with their order from some other restaurant.

This has been a feature that has been requested by a lot of users, but neither Zomato nor Swiggy has been able to introduce it yet.

On ordering from a restaurant, during checkout, Swiggy should be able to recommend a few selected restaurants to add other items from (keeping in mind the distance radius Swiggy delivery folks will be able to pick orders from) notifying the user of increased delivery time but maximum satisfaction.

The right nudge at checkout keeping price in point can motivate users to order more.

Additionally, on the restaurant page as well, users could be notified from which restaurants they can add additional items.

Nudges on Restaurant Page. These nudges can be placed throughout the menu as well, with a guard rail on not breaking the user journey and not being spammy.

This could be a feature that would enable users to not switch to another food delivery app, as well as increase their cart value as well.

If you’re interested in knowing stories on how technology enables Swiggy to provide unparalleled convenience to consumers, I’d strongly urge you to give this a read — https://bytes.swiggy.com/

All said and done, it is imperative to understand that critiquing a product from the outside is an easy venture. Due credit is obviously owed to the talented minds behind the scenes who have made Swiggy this successful.

Any suggestions on improving my approach and if I missed anything in the entire process are most welcome.