Palatable

· Palatable (CEO-led engagement)

Redesign of an on-demand food delivery platform competing with Doordash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats.

Palatable is an on-demand food ordering app available in New Brunswick, NJ, planning national + global expansion. We redesigned the entire app to compete in the on-demand delivery market dominated by Doordash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats.

The problem

What can Palatable offer to end-users that is not prevalent in existing platforms that dominate the on-demand food delivery market?

How do we balance both functionality and usability to create an experience that is both memorable and useful?

Research & analysis

What users told us

“The modal that appears after I click 'My' is confusing”
“I would love the option to first choose a restaurant and then swipe the dishes”
“I want more info on the card itself without requiring me to click on 'Order now'”
“Distance is more important to millennials than price”
“Make it possible to swipe to switch tabs”
“I have issues with the variations in font sizes. They're either too small or appear clickable when they're not”

Process & prototyping

Research: competition analysis of Doordash/Grubhub/Uber Eats USPs; heuristic evaluation of existing Palatable app against Nielsen heuristics (~50 violations enumerated in Appendix A across onboarding, home, order-now, restaurant page, and cart); online user survey.
Test: guerilla usability testing with 10 RU students (target demographic). 13 verbatim quotes captured as findings.
Define: target KPIs structured by objective (Customer Acquisition / Engagement / Retention / Happiness); 3 personas; Maslow's Design Hierarchy of Needs used to prioritize features across Functionality / Reliability / Usability / Proficiency / Creativity.
Ideate: lo-fi prototypes covering personalized onboarding, dish-first swipe flow, swipe history, search filters, dish-first restaurant discovery, restaurant-specific swiping.
Prototype: hi-fi in Adobe XD covering checkout, swipe/dish, liked/unliked, preferences overlay, minimum-delivery suggestions.

Distinctive design ideas

Dish-first browsing — swipe dishes Tinder-style, then see which restaurants serve them (inverts the standard restaurant→dish flow).
Group ordering as a gamified social activity — turns the group-order pain point into a shared activity.
Minimum-delivery filler suggestions — if a cart is under the delivery minimum, the app suggests items matching the user's preferences to top it up.
Onboarding tour triggered on first sign-up to teach the swipe mechanic.

Outcome & impact

Provisional KPIs defined for relaunch measurement; new flows handed off; designs noted as 'still under development' at time of case study writeup.