Case study: Redesigning the Postmates Fleet driver experience
Note: this is a personal project, and I am not affiliated with Postmates except as a driver.
Background
About a month ago I started driving for Postmates to earn some money on the side while searching for a job. I really enjoyed it due to the full flexibility I had in determining when I wanted to work. I also found it to be a fun way to explore the city I lived in and discover new local restaurants.
As with all jobs within today’s gig economy, the income can vary greatly due to factors like day of the week, time of day, and the region you are delivering in. Some days I was able to earn upwards of $30/hour, while on other days I barely managed to scrape $10/hour.
What is Postmates Fleet?
Postmates Fleet is the app that connects delivery drivers to order requests. When you place an order from a restaurant on Postmates, the request shows up on your delivery driver’s screen. They then have a ~30 second window to accept the order, otherwise the request gets passed onto another nearby driver. If the request is accepted, they’ll go to the restaurant and pick up your food, and before you know it, that Dave’s Double® combo meal from Wendy’s is at your doorstep waiting to be eaten.
Minimum Guarantee Bonus
To incentivize drivers to increase delivery volume, Postmates sets minimum guarantee bonuses, meaning if you complete the target number of deliveries in the designated region within a given time frame, the app will ensure you make the guaranteed amount (pre-tip) by paying the difference.
For example: Earn $70 for your next 11 deliveries means that if I completed the deliveries within the guarantee time, I would realistically make ~$40 before tip, and Postmates would pay me an additional $30.
On weekends, the Greater Los Angeles region is split into two zones (LA Core & LA NonCore) with each zone having a different minimum guarantee.
Frustration
One Friday night I came home from a 4-hour shift and was annoyed at how little I made. Like I mentioned previously, the amount you earn can fluctuate between shifts based on a variety of factors. In this particular instance, however, I was upset because I felt a bit scammed by the app.
I was trying to reach a $90 guarantee for 13 deliveries within the LA Core region, but inadvertently accepted a series of orders that were part of LA NonCore, since there is no clear way to distinguish the boundaries of the zones within the app. I didn’t even realize until an hour later that those deliveries didn’t count towards the guarantee I was trying to reach. By then, I had been set back so far that there was no way I could achieve the guarantee for either zone before time ran out. Instead of making either $70 or $90 before tip, I barely made over $50 including tip that night.
Business Impact
Los Angeles is Postmates’ biggest market, where it also happens to have 37% of the market share of sales for meal delivery (compared to its average of 8% in other cities). To keep up with high customer demand, there also need to be enough drivers to fulfill the deliveries.
In today’s world of meal delivery apps and the gig economy, where drivers can (and often do) work for competitor companies, it is important to maintain a consistent driver base that services your platform. A surefire way to losing drivers is for them to feel like they can’t earn money reliably on the platform, or worse, feel cheated by the app.
The following redesign tackles this issue from a UX perspective by addressing some of the key pain points and frustrations of drivers using the Postmates Fleet app.
Understanding the Problem
The Driver’s Perspective
The primary goal of every driver is to maximize earning efficiency, which means making the most money in the least amount of time. As I mentioned before, various factors come into play:
Within Driver’s Control
- Area of operation — the neighborhood you’re delivering in determines the type of restaurants you pick up from (and potentially the tip amount).
- Day of the week — weekends are typically busier than weekdays.
- Time of day — people place more orders during peak meal times.
Outside of Driver’s Control
- Base earnings — the minimum payout for completing a delivery.
- Delivery location —the distance and location of the delivery could be anywhere from 0.5 to 10 miles away.
- Type of pickup — orders requiring you to place the order at the restaurant and pay with a Postmates card are significantly more time consuming than simple prepaid pickups.
- Stacked orders — sometimes the app gives you additional orders, allowing you to complete 2 or more deliveries in a single trip.
- App incentives — per-delivery bonuses or minimum guarantees can make order requests more attractive than usual.
- Tips — while there is no way to know how much tip you’ll receive, I have personally found a correlation between certain neighborhoods and tip amount.
As you can see, most of the factors are outside of the driver’s control. The only agency for drivers is their choice to accept or decline order requests. In order to maximize their earning efficiency, they have to decide whether accepting an order request is worthwhile or not. The problem with the current app is that users are not provided with enough information to effectively make that decision. This can lead to frustrated drivers who feel like they are being cheated by the system.
User Pain Points
Currently when a delivery request appears on the Postmates Fleet app, users are unable to see:
- The minimum payout for the delivery —bonuses aside, drivers make money on a per-delivery basis. They should be able to get a basic idea of how much a trip will net them. This also goes hand in hand with the next point.
- How far they will need to drive — distance means time and [gas] money. If the driver has to drive 10 miles for a $3 delivery, it’s probably not worth their time.
- Which zone the delivery bonus will count towards — a decent portion of earnings come from Postmates incentives, which is why it’s important for drivers to make sure they meet the delivery criteria for completing the bonuses.
- Whether they need to use the Postmates card — orders that require you to order and pay with the Postmates credit card almost always take more time and effort than ones that are already prepared by the restaurant. Time is money, especially for delivery drivers.
I once had to pick up an order from a sushi restaurant on a Friday night. When I arrived I discovered that I had to place the order and pay with the Postmates credit card. I ended up waiting 30 minutes for the food to be ready because the kitchen was so backed up. If I had known that it wasn’t just a typical prepaid order, I would’ve declined it. I probably could have completed 2 or 3 orders within that time frame!
Sometimes it feels like the only choice as a driver is to accept the order and hope for the best. Although there are no penalties for declining an order request, your hands are tied once you accept an order. If you try to cancel an order you accepted, the app warns you that you may get deactivated.
Solution
Design Goals
The goal of this project was to give more agency to drivers by providing them with more information to make calculated decisions regarding order requests. Since it is not always in the driver’s best interests to accept every request that comes their way, knowing which orders to accept or decline is the key to maximizing their earning efficiency. It is also important to note that drivers often receive order requests while on the road, so the new features needed to be easily scannable.
New Design
Here are the changes I made to the order request screen and why they provide a better experience for drivers:
- App bonus zones indicated directly on the map — previously, the minimum guarantee zones (LA Core & LA NonCore) were not drawn on the map. If you wanted to check the zone boundaries, you had to pull up the map on the guarantee details page, which couldn’t even be zoomed into. By overlaying them on the main map, users can easily identify the boundaries of each zone.
- Accept timer matches zone color — the ring around the Accept button shows how much time the driver has to accept the order request before it passes on to someone else. The color of the ring corresponds to the zone the order is in to provide additional clarity for the user.
- Text clarity for zone — the text provides another source of visual confirmation to the user that the order will go toward a guarantee. The color coding of the region names also maintains consistency with the colors shown on the map.
- App bonus progress indicator — if the order request goes toward an app bonus, the badge [on the top right corner] shows the number of deliveries needed to reach the respective goal. This helps users gauge progress and delivery efficiency throughout their shift.
- Minimum payout and mileage — within the Accept button, the pre-tip earnings are shown, along with the distance from the restaurant to the delivery location. Drivers can use these numbers to estimate how long it will take them to complete a delivery compared to dollars earned.
- Pick-up type icon — next to the restaurant name is an icon showing what type of pick-up the driver can expect. Orders requiring a Postmates credit card are highlighted in yellow to catch the user’s attention because they usually take longer than prepaid orders. This provides users with a heads up that they may need to factor in additional time onto their delivery trip.
With the new design, Postmates delivery drivers are provided with more relevant details about each order request. They can more confidently evaluate whether accepting an order will boost or hurt their earning efficiency, giving them more control, resulting in a better user experience for the drivers.
Final Thoughts
A potential downside to indicating the pick-up type is that drivers may be discouraged from accepting orders requiring the Postmates card, which could negatively impact service availability and delivery speed from those restaurants. If implementation of this change does lead to a decrease in acceptance rate, it could be a business opportunity to incentivize acceptance of those orders, such as providing a bonus for completion of those orders.
This was a short one-week project, so I focused on just redesigning the order request screen. I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or do a complete overhaul of the app, especially since the UX for the rest of the app felt pretty smooth.
It might be important to note that a good amount of the user analysis came from my personal experience, as I also consider myself a target user. Since I don’t personally know others who drive for Postmates, my user research was mostly conducted through r/Postmates subreddit and Youtube channels dedicated to gig economy jobs.
There were some additional features I thought of that would make the Postmates driver experience even better but decided to keep the project scope small. If you would be interested in a sequel to this redesign, please let me know!
P.S. Don’t forget to tip your delivery drivers! You can help make their day 🙂
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