Contextual Inquiry of Food Ordering Apps: An Indian Perspective

Introduction

In the recent years, there has been rapid digitization and growth of internet services in developing countries, including India. The internet penetration has also increased at a rapid rate in India, with over 250 million new internet users added in the last 5 years (statista.com, 2020). As a result, there has been a surge in the number of people accessing internet-based and app-based services over traditional services. One such important service is provided through food ordering or delivery applications. Though the concept of food ordering is not new, and the more traditional way of ordering by calling a restaurant has existed for a long time, the advent of Food Ordering Apps (FDAs) has significantly improved the ease and convenience of ordering the desired food from a restaurant. While earlier a customer had to keep note of all the restaurants providing food delivery, their phone numbers, and timings too, now most food ordering applications do all the book-keeping for the user. These apps remove all the hassles in ordering food, making it a simple and easy process. This has resulted in a massive growth of the food delivery market and has also resulted in an increase in the business profits. Consequently, there is an emergence of several food ordering mobile app brands, in the highly competitive food ordering business. Figure 1 shows two leading food ordering apps.

Figure 1.

Screenshots of leading food delivery apps - (a) Zomato and (b) Swiggy

The rise of food ordering apps has led to a change in the mindset and perception of Indian customers towards ordering of food, which creates an interesting avenue for research about Indian users. Since the Indian diaspora is very culturally, religiously as well as ethnically diverse, the food habits of customer groups and families also vary significantly among different user groups. Another dimension of diversity in India, is the economic split between customers or users. Food ordering apps are used by the rich, middle class, lower-middle class as well as the poor users of India. All these aspects lead to starkly different food ordering preferences and app usage trends among Indian users. Understanding these differentiating dimensions and related user categories can significantly help in improving the design of future food ordering apps. The main objective of this research paper is to perform a contextual inquiry with the Indian users of food ordering apps and build ‘work models’ from the data obtained, to derive related vital aspects, which would be useful for the design of future food-ordering apps. In the process, an extensive literature review related with food ordering apps and a peer app review of leading food ordering apps is also performed to support the contextual inquiry and to find the design trends available in the related apps and suggest room for improvement.

Literature Review

A literature review of the currently existing research papers on food ordering or delivery apps has been completed to better understand the domain of food ordering and delivery. For this, research papers in the domain of food ordering / delivery were studied. Initially, Google Scholar was searched for research papers with the keywords - food delivery, India, Zomato and Swiggy. Papers which were relevant to Indian users and which also included important trends in food ordering, were selected and studied further.