Dronedrop

March – April 2021

Brand Strategy / Visual Design / UX

Project Vision

DroneDrop is a drone delivery service being tested in a major metropolitan area. DroneDrop aims to speed up delivery of groceries, restaurant take-out, pharmacy goods, and other items from local stores. Their service is only $0.99 and promises to fly most items to customers in under 5 minutes.

Challenge

Busy individuals don’t have enough time to go shopping, and delivery takes a long time. They want fast service without paying a lot for delivery fees.

Solution

DroneDrop that allows customers to order quickly and track the drone from the store to their location.

User Cases

I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was working adults who want fast local delivery.  This user group confirmed initial assumptions about DroneDrop customers, but research also revealed that time was not the only factor limiting users from cooking at home. Other user problems included obligations, interests, or challenges that make it difficult to get groceries for cooking or go to restaurants in-person. 

Jessica Paralegal, 27 Jessica orders groceries, takeout, and other home items on her phone, and needs an app that will allow her to place and track drone orders all the way to her house. Between work and her workout schedule, she doesn’t have time to wait around for delivery drivers.

Jason Car parts salesman, 38 Jason has a huge variety of car parts from popular to extremely rare. He has built a demanding customer base that needs fast and accurate shipping of parts. He thinks that drone delivery is the right solution, but he’s not tech savvy and wants a solution that’s simple to use.

Pain Points

Competitive Audit

	Amazon Prime Air	Manna	UPS Flight Forward
Available now	○	●	○
Services U.S.	●	○	●
Multiple languages	●	○	●
$0.99 fee delivery	○	○	○

Ideation

Creating several versions of the home page by hand allowed me to design the most efficient and intuitive layout to help users find the items they’re looking for quickly. As I started the design process and included all of the home page features discovered during user research. Faster checkout was a key concern among users, and also furthers the design goal of a faster shopping process.

Paper wireframes

Digital wireframes

Usability Study Findings 

I conducted two rounds of usability studies with producers and film fans. Findings from the first study helped guide the designs from wireframes to mockups. The second study used a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockups needed refining. 

Round 1

• One-step location is preferable to two-step location
• Users want more timing information
• Users like fast drone delivery service

Round 2

• Some labels were too wordy
• Users wanted a way home on each page
• Stakeholders wanted more branding

Affinity Map

I used an affinity map to organize user responses so I could analyze the research findings by identifying patterns and themes.

Mockups

Early designs allowed for a quick ordering process, but after the usability studies, I combined the two-step location process into one step. I also simplified the labels to be easier to understand.  The second usability study revealed frustration with navigation and branding. Users wanted more tracking info and a way to get back to the home page, and stakeholders wanted to see the logo more.

Brand Guidelines

I selected orange as the primary brand color so the packaging would stand out on the complementary blue of the sky where the drone will be seen. The color also distinguishes DroneDrop from other delivery services. I created a simple “D” mark with a wing and skewed to the right to illustrate speed. 

Solution

Super fast delivery

Drones offer the fastest delivery available today. They completely avoid traffic to deliver your order faster than humanly possible.

Support local businesses 

The variety of shopping local with the ease of staying at home. Shop from your favorite local stores near you to support your community.

Precise delivery points

The app automatically detects your location and gives you a satellite map to select a precise delivery point that’s visible from the sky so the drone has a safe place to land.

Delivery now or later

Schedule your delivery to arrive at a set time, or request delivery right now. Once your order is ready, it takes the drone less than 5 minutes to arrive at your location.

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Takeaways

Designing DroneDrop was a great lesson in letting data drive the design process. The brand color which was selected because it stands out against the sky, and process flow changes were based on direct user feedback. I also discovered that many accessibility features are overlooked in the early stages of the process. Usability studies, color theory, and stakeholder feedback influenced each iteration of the app’s designs. Check out the demo.