the online consumer’s hierarchy of needs
Deliveroo – This is a food delivery website that offers delivery from restaurants that would not normally offer delivery, including fast food and Café’s.
There are 3 consumer needs identified by researchers when looking at the online consumer’s hierarchy of needs. These needs are the structural firmness of the site (security), functional convenience, and representational delight
The layout of the website is consistent throughout with a calm and welcoming user interface and colour scheme. This fits the need of the functional convenience since the website is easy to navigate. By having easy to use and relevant characteristics on the website such as ‘my account’ and ‘checkout’ the consumer will always be informed with regards to where they are in the process of actually completing an order. With large text, this is clear and easy to access making the process of ordering the food as simple and trouble-free as possible.
By having a consistent colour scheme and simple layout an atmosphere is created. This is an atmosphere that shows that the website is calm and in a no pressure situation. Deliveroo has also created this effect by adding pleasant photos of all the food provided by each restaurant on the home page of the website.
The most basic need for a website consumer is the structural firmness of the site. This need reflects that the consumer needs the website being used to be safe and secure. With the rise in online fraud and the always prevalent risk of fraud, Deliveroo must ensure all payments are made securely. This need also represents things such as response time of the website. Deliveroo has heavily invested into servers to ensure that large amounts of traffic can be accommodated too and will prevent the website from crashing when used by a large number of users.
This experience could be enhanced by having sounds and or videos on the website giving more information about the selected restaurant or meal. This has been proven to increase the user experience since the consumer will feel more informed and have more senses stimulated, therefore becoming more engaged with the website.
Another improvement would be the implementation of a side-bar/cuisine categories. If there was a side-bar to select different types of food then it would become even easier for the user to find a specific food type that they are looking for. This also could be furthered by improving the search system to allow for food searches instead of just restaurant searches. These improvements would improve the consumer experience by improving the actual functional convenience of the website.