ele. me is the second largest food delivery platform in China. However, ele.me's market growth has slowed in recent years, with rival Meituan.com growing at more than double the rate in comparison. At the same time, food waste and environmental pollution caused by the rise of the takeaway industry has had a serious impact on society that cannot be ignored.
This is the story of how I designed the immersive food service for Ele.me - to connect the emotional relationship between the brand and its users.

My Role

This is my personal project, from January 2021 to March 2021, I was responsible for the user research, ideation framing, visual design, technology testing and iteration.

Ele.me is an Internet O2O life service platform in China that provides online food ordering, offline group purchases, and intra-city express delivery services. It is currently the second largest online food ordering and delivery platform in China (after Meituan Waimai).

Although Meituan went public later than Ele.me, the number of Meituan users, the number of starts and the duration of use have all exceeded Ele.me.

“Today’s interpretation of fine dining has less to do with linens, cheese carts, and hushed voices, and more to do with creativity and impeccable service.” -Beth Kanter

Meituan and Ele.me are two of the most popular food takeaway apps in China. Although Ele.me entered the market earlier, Meituan has gained more users and user activity.

User Interview

I interviewed 10 people who regularly use ele.me as an everyday item to find out about their attitudes and experiences of using meal delivery, in order to gain insight into the problems they encounter in their lives.

Initial Insights

When people eat takeaways alone, they often get bored and play with their phones, watch videos, read magazines, do computer or other activities which are more likely to cause distraction and metabolic syndrome.

Before I started designing, it was important to understand the user's experience, feelings and needs when using the takeaway software

Ideation Develop

Referring to Daniel Carman's "Peak-End Rule", it says: "Intense positive or negative moments ("peaks") and the final moments of experience ("ends") are heavily weighted in our mental calculations."
In this case, I set up and emphasised this four-point journey map, namely the starting point, the negative point, the positive point and the end point.

Deeper Insights

1. It takes a lot of time to think about what to eat.
2. The steps to ordering should be simple and quick.
3. It is good to learn about the history and culture of the food while waiting for your meal.
4. It is less boring to do other things while eating.

Eative respects the brand positioning of Ele.me. Enhancing the excitement of the ordering experience and reducing negative moments, thus increasing the user's trust in the brand and building an emotional connection.

Eating is more than just eating; it should be a time of mental relaxation, a time of rejuvenation, a time to make diners smile.

The biggest challenge I faced throughout the project was to plan the big picture and move forward while thinking about the business value of serving Ele.me. Because the project involved ordering, waiting, eating and afterwards, I needed to focus on each key step. It was difficult. So I used a system map to show each component and boundary of the project system, as well as the environment components at a point in time.

Deepen Reliance

My design idea was how to increase users' trust and loyalty to the platform without changing their usage habits. By reducing the time users spend making decisions and highlighting the function of emotional companionship, at the same time, I created a communication community to increase users' usage scenarios and gradually deepen their perception of the brand.

Design Language

In this project I defined the visual style of the brand and the derived IP character image. This provided a consistent visual style and the possibility of quick replication within the project's workflow services.

In addition to recommending food to users based on their ordering history, it also provides a variety of food recommendation methods to help users quickly choose what they want to eat and reduce the decision-making time.

On the food details page, users can not only learn more information about food, but also see the appearance and weight of food more intuitively through VR, so as to make a better choice of personalized taste.

Users tend to be anxious when they are waiting for food. By displaying food information in the form of game cards, users can reduce their anxiety in an easy way and learn more about food at the same time.

In the VR experience of emotional companionship, I classified common foods and designed different human-food interactive stories for different types of food. In the process of eating, brand spokesperson - BOBO will perform for users, guide them to eat, remind them of health and so on.

VR Interaction Design

When users put on the VR device and choose to connect with the virtual world, they can interact with BOBO in the virtual world with an avatar of their own design. During meals, using artificial intelligence facial expression recognition, BOBO makes friendly and healthy eating suggestions based on the user's behaviour and provides a light-hearted entertainment show for the user.

By recycling vegetable starch from fruits and vegetables, I designed a naturally degradable takeout box that comes with a package of plant seeds at every food delivery. After finishing the meal, users can place the meal box directly in the soil and wait for the plants to grow. Users can share their meal feedback and planting feelings in the app.

This is an interesting service design project, in which I learned to attach importance to the feelings and gains and losses of all stakeholders in each process node. At the same time, this project also expanded my skills in visual design and 3D modeling, which was an unforgettable experience