Part 1: Proposal for Improvement of Foodpanda Application

 

System: Foodpanda Delivery App

 

Introduction:

 

Food delivery services could be claimed as one of the luckiest industries in the midst of this pandemic. While many other businesses are heavily susceptible to the impact of lockdown, the market of the food delivery services is fueled by the lockdown. Food delivery services not only have become a new alternative approach of purchasing meals under the movement restriction but also provide dozens of job opportunities for the citizens. Food vendors are able to survive even without customers dining in their restaurants as the food delivery platform also offer advertisement service to them. Therefore, food delivery services undoubtedly play a huge role in building sustainable cities and communities (SDG). However, we also have to acknowledge the fact that food delivery services do not always play their job perfectly. According to Statista.com, Foodpanda is the most used app for food delivery orders in Malaysia as of August 2021. At the same time, it has a rating of 3.9 on Google Store which is relatively low for an application with 50 million downloads. Hence, there is an urgency to look into this problem in order to monitor the role of Foodpanda in the building of sustainable cities and communities.

 

1. Problems.

 

The problems in the existing application are:

 

i. Foods promoted on Foodpanda are not health-oriented.

While Foodpanda allows its users to categorize food based on cuisine type, rating, price range and many other criteria, nutrition value is not one of them. The application does not provide any information on the nutrition value of the food promoted to the user. This defect definitely become an inconvenience for those users who value purchasing healthy food on Foodpanda. They would have to search for the food’s nutritional information by themselves before purchasing it, which in turn slows down and ruins their experience of using Foodpanda. Furthermore, general users who are not aware of the food’s nutrition value may have higher possibility of purchasing food with high calories and sugars without any realization. As the consequence, Foodpanda would need to be held responsible for being one of the factors that causing an unhealthy diets among it users.

 

 

ii. Customers do not receive notifications on order cancellation outside of the application.

It is not strange have orders cancelled on Foodpanda due to any unexpected event that beyond Foodpanda’s capabilities. However, it is strange that Foodpanda could provide push notifications to the users when their orders are cancelled. A typical food delivery process would consume 20 to 40 minutes. It is not realistic and definitely inconvenient to let the users repeatedly open the application and track the orders in this period of time. Besides, it is also extremely inefficient when the order is cancelled 10 minutes after it is placed but the users only know about it after another 20 minutes because the application does not notify them. The users now have to repeat the entire delivery process once again and perhaps face another unnoticed order cancellation. In short, the food purchasing and delivery process becomes extremely time-consuming without the push notifications.

 

iii. Services needed by riders and vendors are not included in the application.

Foodpanda does not offer satisfy the requirement of riders and vendors although both parties are two of the core users of this application. For example, a Foodpanda rider needs to download extra application which is not originally developed by Foodpanda in order to implement the delivery task. Food vendors must go to the Foodpanda official website in order to register as a food vendor in the Foodpanda platform. While Foodpanda does include the tutorial in regard to the matters above, it is unreasonable to not let the vendors and rider fully utilize the Foodpanda application with features that they deserve.

 

2. Proposed Solutions

 

Name of the system : “Foodpanda”

 

 Our proposed solutions to the problems are:

 

i. Add the nutrition value to the descriptions of food.

Nutrition value should be added as a tag to every food that is promoted to the customers. The nutrition tag would be guaranteed to be visible by every user without require them to click the option for further information. Users would be allowed to categorize and search the food based on the nutrition tag. With the nutrition tag, Foodpanda also need to set up a special category on the application homepage that primarily promote healthy food with good nutrition value. This feature would allow the users to have the freedom of purchasing healthy food as they are now aware of every nutritional detail about the food that they order. 

 

ii. Push notifications of food delivery progress should be added as the default feature to the application.

The push notifications should be able to update the food delivery progress for any time interval that could be determined by the users. This feature would significantly promote the application usability since users could now easily keep track of their order without having to open the application. The customizable time interval provide flexibility for the users as they could decide by their own when should they check for the phone for latest progress of the delivery.

iii. Provide the features that are specifically for the riders and vendors.

Foodpanda should include full features for riders and vendors like “Join as rider” and “Join as vendor” on the homepage of the application. The buttons should be made highly visible and could be easily accessed. Once clicking the buttons, riders and vendors would be redirected to the new user interface that are specially designed for them. 

 

 

3. Target Users

 

i. Application users: Now a days almost people of all range of age uses foodpanda app to order food. Every user needs different calories to consume each day. It will be very helpful for the people of senior age as they can see the calories included beside the food they want to order as well. People who are suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problem can choose food from their suitable menu. Same goes for the teenagers, the problem of obesity can be reduced. Because everyone is conscious about their health. Moreover everyone can keep a record of their food history.

ii. Riders: Riders are not only one of the users of Foodpanda application, but also the employees of the Foodpanda. The riders represent a large portion of Foodpanda delivery services’ quality and punctuality. They also rely on Foodpanda to earn their incomes. Therefore, it is the responsibility of Foodpanda to promote the riders’ efficiency in carrying out their jobs which is through the forth solution. In Malaysia, Foodpanda has more than 14,000 riders. The riders help to deliver the food in the correct destination.

https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&sxsrf=AOaemvKctqq3bElqklni72YdEIdOaSd11g%3A1638200168099&q=foodpanda%20user%20statistics%20singapore&ved=2ahUKEwjFpNyY8730AhVzSmwGHesuCEgQmoICKAJ6BAgEEBU&biw=1368&bih=769&dpr=2

 

iii.  Food vendors: Food vendors are the suppliers of the Foodpanda application. Foodpanda has the responsibility to correctly describe the products supplied by the vendors on the application and promote them to the customers. Hence, the second and forth solutions are considered to beneficial to the food vendors.

 

iv. Local community: In the modified application, the part of the charity includes the people who are needy. Everyday many people starve and pass the whole day like that. People who are capable to donate they can send the food by the riders to them. So basically the user will order the food and select the charity section to deliver the food.