Real Life Experience Through User Testing: My First Rider (Walker) and Picker Experience
This month I had my very first rider (walker) and picker experience. At Delivery Hero, we have this cool internal formation called the Innovations Hub where we can be part of this amazing life experience to have grocery orders ready to be delivered and also handle delivery of actual food orders to the recipients after picking them up from restaurants. 🚲
Here is a great excerpt from our news room article that brilliantly summarizes what the Innovations Hub is:
The Innovations Hub is a realistic small-scale restaurant and quick commerce set-up, designed for Berlin-based employees to test new features at the Delivery Hero headquarters.
Born out of the desire to bring Delivery Hero’s central operations closer to its core business, the Innovations Hub is part of the company’s mission to develop and build best-in-class delivery apps. The Hub offers a safe learning and testing environment, allowing developers to trial new features and products and optimize their functionality before rolling out to pre-existing markets worldwide.
The Rider (Walker) Experience
When I heard about the rider (walker) experience I immediately opted in for the shift and arranged one. I wanted to take less risk and chose the walker option (instead of the rider option where you pick-up and deliver using a bike). 🚶🏻
During my lunch hour (12–1pm) period, I visited the Innovations Hub and grabbed my amazing food delivery backpack and started my shift on my phone app and walked around with great excitement, hoping to get a notification for an order that’s placed. 📳
After 8 minutes or so, walking past the beautiful Spree 🌊, I had my very first opportunity to pick up an order. 🤗 I clicked yes 👌 and started navigating to find the restaurant. Everything was so intuitive and accessible, kudos folks, the app provided me with all the insights, even the minutes left to pick the food up, etc. (Oh, I should say that I felt a little bit nervous as the clock ticked.) ⏳
And voila I was there, showed the id to the restaurant representative and picked the package and now it was time to deliver the freshly prepared food to its owner as soon as possible. ⏳ I placed the package inside my insulated backpack and started navigating to the final destination. 🚶♂️
I took a photo of evidence for the drop off and voila I completed my first flow. Then I picked another one, went back to find the restaurant and after delivery, then another then another… Phew I think I made 5 hungry people happy as I delivered their meals on time. 🚀
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Based on the important stats from my shift (was delivered automatically as an e-mail — amazing integration), it turns out that I delivered 5 orders and my UTR (orders/working time) was 4.68. During this one-hour period, I walked 3.1 kilometers in total. 🥳
The Picker Experience
When I enrolled for the rider (walker) shift, I did the same for the picker shift as well. With the picker experience, it’s all about preparing as many orders as possible. It’s all about finding where is where in the Innovations Hub (groceries section), scanning the articles and fitting things to have the orders ready to be picked-up. 🛒
During another one hour slot, I visited the Innovations Hub once again and picked up my hand terminal, assisted by one of the amazing people of the Innovations Hub and started preparing orders. 📟
It was less confusing than I expected. Everything, the app, the shelving, the markers were all well-thought-of. It was all down to the matter of grouping orders coming from the same person and fulfilling them one by one.
There were of course some subtleties like making sure that frozen or chilled items are stored in appropriate places however other than that, that hour went blazingly fast. I really enjoyed it. ⚠️
The Aftermath
This experience taught me many things as I was able to reflect and think, especially during my rider (walker) experience, during walking in cold and strong wind 🥶 (No, I am not exaggerating). Here are the top three:
- ✅ Empathy: It is really something we might neglect during our rush everyday. It is a good practice, if not a virtue, to show empathy in almost every action we take, that involves other people. When we’re talking about food delivery for instance, it is not usually something people purposefully would deliver the food 5 minutes late, deliver them cold or spill some of the drinks.
- ✅ Humbleness: Letting go of our egos might not be that trivial when we think. It is easy to say but not that easy to put into action every minute. This practice emphasized the importance of humbleness once again, not to say I am not humble but the importance of being humble. When you are not the delivery person, you are welcomed to the restaurant, smiled at or treated differently; whereas when you have the delivery bag with you, you might be told to simply wait outside.
- ✅ Experimenting: Experimenting is not just for the software we produce or things we build. It’s also valid for ourselves, too. You would never know how you would behave in a totally different situation: Sadness? Frustration? Anxiety?
Well, what’s next? Most probably I’ll schedule new slots for both shifts regularly… 🗓️ In order to test and provide feedback on some of the innovative stuff we are cooking as a great company, understand how logistics, warehousing and order fulfillment chains work and observe what kind of challenges people have in earning their lives.
I also understood, once again, the importance of testing own products from the end-user perspective. After all, knowing your users (or customers) is the ultimate ingredient to success. 🚀
PS: Kudos to all great minds and people at the Innovations Hub for the onboarding, help and innovation. ❤️
