The fastest food in the city — How Deliveroo speed up iteration and drive great design with Marvel

Industry: Food Delivery
Key Feature: Prototyping
HQ: Global

Deliveroo has transformed the way we think about eating out - by bringing restaurants to our doorstep. Their mission to become the world’s best delivery service is well underway; with their product becoming a place for discovery of new cuisines, supporting restaurant growth and providing flexible and secure jobs for riders. With these three big counterparts, they need tools that help them scale, their way.

Simon Rohrbach is Deliveroo’s Director of Content, Research and Design and has been with the company since they were a headcount of 12 people. Four years later, they employ 2,000 people, with the Design team alone standing at 35. To scale this quickly, they harboured an entrepreneurial and energetic spirit which fuels the changing horizons that come with being Deliveroo.

Design, as a discipline, helps them work towards their mission in the fastest, easiest and most flexible manner. “The user base we now serve is global, we’re in 12 different countries, so what’s really important is that we understand the needs of every single one of our users”.

“We tackle this by implementing a fast iteration cycle. Through design we can visualise what an experience might look like and put that in front of the right people. Even if that just means agreeing internally what that would look like. We try to make this iteration cycle as fast as possible so that we can get from idea to launch as quickly as possible. Marvel helps with exactly that.”

With Marvel’s prototyping tool, Deliveroo shorten the time span of new ideas becoming new features. They produce powerful feedback through putting interactive and realistic mock-ups in front of internal and external stakeholders alike and walking them through an experience. “Until Marvel came along, that wouldn’t have been possible.”

Deliveroo has created a hybrid design team made up of three disciplines: product, content and research. With 25 designers, 10 researchers and 5 people in content. The three disciplines work functionally and autonomously, deciding quarter to quarter what features they want to focus on and which metrics they want to move.

One of the things that Deliveroo encourage on the team is that sharing is good but sharing as early as possible and getting feedback is great. So each discipline uses Marvel early on to convey their ideas to the rest of the team to validate and create actionable next steps.

“This ability to get an idea from Sketch, or even from wireframes, and approach it as a team, means we evaluate and polish it together, quickly. Marvel really supports this process because it puts our ideas into a format where people can really experience how something will look and feel.”

The key prototyping offering is what Simon and his team make the most use of. “It helps a lot with our user testing, it creates a base for written review and our Enterprise account gives us the additional flexibility and the support that we need.”

One of the projects that Deliveroo had been working on recently was changing the look of their consumer app. Simon tells us he found this project particularly interesting as it highlighted that you can propose a dramatically different idea as often as you like - but what’s actually important is that you can communicate that idea down that line.

“Marvel is really great for conveying ideas really quickly. There’s only a small amount of work that takes mock-ups into high-fidelity, where we can really see what transitions might look like.” Having this ability to move swiftly from concept to a visual prototype helps them move quicker through their iterative cycle and provides a point of reference for a new idea.

And once that idea is out in the ether and a high fidelity prototype has been created, they put it in front of users across the different devices Deliveroo operates on.

Deliveroo run user testing sessions every other week to gather proof of concept and feedback from crucial external parties - presenting questions and insight the internal team may not have considered. They do a mix of formats with lots of in-depth, diary interviews in the early stages as they provide more informative and qualitative feedback and this insight then goes back into their cycle and iterations can be made.

Five years ago you could probably name the tools that everyone uses on less than two hands. Now what’s really powerful is to have seen product design get to a stage where there is so much happening in the tool space - and with Marvel doing as well as it has, is a testament to the quality of the product.”