talabat

How I tackled  A Design Interview Challenge

The most popular online food ordering platform in the middle east - Owned by Delivery Hero -  ( * I got the offer )

How I tackled  A Design Interview Challenge

The most popular online food ordering platform in the middle east - Owned by Delivery Hero -  ( * I got the job )

A Bit of Background

I did this project as part of a product design interview ( of which I’m happy to report that I got accepted as a product designer ). Anyhow, my intention in publishing this piece is to demonstrate a framework I’ve used that has worked for a variety of many design challenges.

The Challenge 

Revamping the moderation process, the current review of the moderation process is tedious. It takes approximately three days for the check to be moderated by the content team. The content team would like to optimize the review moderation process time.
What is review moderation? Every time a customer rates an order on the app, it gets forwarded to the Content moderation team for moderation. The team currently uses the CMS for this task.
 

The Goals / Requirements

  • show how I would use my problem-solving skills to solve this problem.
  • Create a solution that enhances the moderation experience and decreases the review moderation time.

  • Tell what information I’ll need and who I would talk to inform my design decisions.

  • tell how I would validate my proposed solution.

Screen-Shot-2020-11-07-at-9.27.49-PM

Define The Context

I assume that the content moderation system has remained unchanged for a long time. For the sake of the user base that has become huge lately, the review moderation process becomes too slow, and It takes approximately three days to do. Its redesign is an opportunity to improve/enhance the moderation flow and speed up the process, which could decrease the processing time and make the content moderation team easier to use.

What: Revamping the review moderation process. 
Who:
Content moderation team -The content manager who's moderate the review process -.
Why: Decrease the processing time and become easier to handle by the content team.

 

My Process/Approach

Before jumping into the research/design phase. I always like to start with building my process/map to follow; you can say that I'm creating a framework for myself. But like any framework, it can be perfect as a guideline, and sometimes it can't fit every task/step, so I use my judgment as to when to apply it. 

process-2

Exploring/Discovering Mode

I would put myself in exploring mode, I need to understand more about the core of the problems and where it comes from, Why it takes 3 days to be done! I need more info about user behavior and how he is interacting with the current system! too many questions need to be answered. so, I would split my process into several steps and I assume that I did them perfectly. 

  • Building an empathy map for the content team to know more info about this persona.
  • Building job stories to understand and define motivations.
  • Deconstruct the existing review moderation process ( Funnel creation and analysis ).
  • Understand business needs.

  

1) Building an empathy map with the content team

The main challenge here is knowing more about the content team, their pain points, why they are taking 3 days, what areas of the flow/funnels need more attention to fix. my solution here is creating an empathy map to articulate what we know about the content team and his behavior.

 

empathymap
2) Building job stories to understand/define motivations.

All of the information above is critical and very informative because we’re focusing on empathizing.
Each job story should provide as much context as possible and help understand the user’s motivations and expectations.

user-storiees-1
3) Deconstruct the existing review moderation process

It's time to understand how the current review moderation process works ( funnels ) - the flow was already provided as a document by them -, and the intention behind each decision; for sure, this step will need some extra help from the project managers or the business analysis.  Unfortunately, the simple flow that was provided not gave me not much info.

map
4) Understand business needs  

After the empathy and understand/define the motivation of the user, I assume that I sat down with the Product Manager & any other persona that related to user reviews  can give me more and new insights
( Developers, Quality, etc. )  to understand more the business goals and needs

I always prefer, or I think, it is a good idea to appoint the Product designer to work together with the product manager. For several reasons, one of them is that the product manager is a representative of the company's business, which means the company goals are as important as the needs of the user. 

In theory, a unified perspective is good, "I mean the design perspective," but it doesn't really work in real life. The truth is that you need more perspective to solve the problem and satisfy both users and company goals.

Identify key problem areas & And getting out solutions

Once I understood everything clearly with the help of data from the research and the existing flow, the problems can range from usability issues to visual flows, inconsistencies, wrong patterns applied, or exotic solutions without any reason, but I laid out the problems and complaints that each user had from the content team to some kind of affinity map to I can prioritizing the problems.


cards2-1

Suggested solution

After some inspiration and scribbling in my notebook, I decided to create the first concept as a Kanban Board; I needed to categorizing/splitting the incoming reviews into three types of visual processes (columns) to empower the team to self-manage workflow very quickly, the splitting can give each review/comment priority/level. ( tier#1, tier#2, and tier#3 ).

Each tier owns a particular effort, flow, and actions that can increase the efficiency of reviewing the moderation process, reduce wasting time, and speed up the process. Categorizing/Splitting the reviews can indicate how much time and effort will take per each, which will reflect on our strategy and reduce the flow time.  

" It's like if you are wake-up in the morning and decided to finish the easier tasks first or difficult ones first, then you do a simple Kanban board on your notebook to offers to yourself a way to visualize and manage your tasks. "

 

kanban

Improving the current flow ( The funnel )

Incoming reviews tier#1 (Positive column): The review that is not triggering our bad keywords, any keywords, Having 5 stars, needs a quick review to get the approval.

Incoming reviews tier#2 (Natural column): The review that is not triggering our bad keywords, Having 4 stars and lower, and possibly include any complaint about the experience  ( food, deliver, taste, etc.).

Incoming reviews tier#3 (Negative column): The review triggering our bad keywords, Having any numbers of stars, needs to check if it is fake or inappropriate.

 

Newwmapp
concluio

Sketching & scribble always wins

After I had a better understanding of user goals and motivation, it was time to use my dotted notebook to sketch some screens. Sketching gave me some ideas on how things would look, and I did my work for the next step as a visual design much more effortless.

IMG_9978-1

 High-fidelity user interface

After validating the idea using pen and paper, I decided to skip the wireframing phase for the lack of time and get on the High-Fidelity step.

Board-view-Copy-5-1

The main screen that contains 3 scrollable columns sorted by date

Board-view-Copy-6-1

Conversation view, the moderator can check all the review history and the last updates

 Explain the design components

I just listed some of the design elements that I used and described the meaning behind these elements for more clarification; for sure, this section was created only to give you a little insight into how I think and implement.

tools

Measure success & Validation

Coming up with a solution doesn't help much if I don't know to measure its success. Now is the time to close the loop and define how I can validate the solution.

I always prefer usability testing; it will be perfect, especially if we need to focus more on the system, discover the flow's pain points, and switch those points to enhancements for more usability. I need just the following: 

  • Test tasks.
  • Test Parameters.
  • And for sure, don't forget a small gift for the user who will do the content manager.
    ( coffee will be OK).

Some KPI's:

  • Task completion time is the time it takes for the user to complete the task -review the comment-.

  • Task success rates the percentage of correctly completed tasks -review the comment- by moderators. 

All Done!

Like I said in the beginning, I did this case study as part of a product design interview ( of which, I’m happy again to report that I got accepted as a product designer : )