Grubhub for Drivers:
Message Center
Discovery
The driver app is the main tool our drivers use to partner with us. They use this tool to manage logistics around picking up and delivering orders. If we need to send them critical updates about an order, such as when a diner’s address changes, we typically do so in the moment. But what about non-critical comms, such as news, special offers, or updates that are personalized to the driver’s lifecycle with us? This is where Message Center comes in. It’s a space for informational, educational, or promotional campaigns when we want to passively communicate with drivers in the form of concise, short form content.
Audit of message types
There are a few benefits to this being a dedicated space in the driver app, and also being integrated with a third party software:
We’d be able to cut down on some of the emails we’d send to drivers and repurpose them for a message center. We had data that showed drivers were unsubscribing from emails, and sometimes missing out on certain comms.
We’d no longer have to overstimulate the driver with pop-up messages and dialogs in the app that interrupt their experience.
Marketing would have more autonomy around when and how they communicate with drivers without reaching out to the product team to have one-off messages designed and built.
GH could engage with drivers without the need for additional tech resources or app releases.
Methodology
After defining the need, I did some competitive benchmarking on similar apps that offer similar functionality. I wanted to understand how competitors are positioning comms in their information hierarchy. I also wanted to understand any conventions around a message center users might come to expect (read/unread state, unread message indicator), vs other features which might be nice-to-haves (timestamp, ability to delete messages). Benchmarking competitor products helped us understand where we might fit in the landscape based on our own feature set.
Competitive benchmarking summary
Next I needed to evaluate our own product to explore how this concept of a message center might fit into the existing structure. How could we position it so it fits the driver’s mental model of where they might expect it to be? We dug into the driver app one level at a time:
I decided that the app’s nav menu would be the ideal placement since it allows an intuitive way for messages to be accessed if the driver wants to engage, but keep messages out of the way if not. I was wary this placement meant new messages could go unnoticed unless the driver is notified or actively opening the menu, but also it would fit the non-critical characterization of comms within message center. So it became a logical compromise.
Having a solid list of our feature set defined, I explored some rough sketches and wireframes, primarily to answer the questions:
How does a driver access the message center?
How does a driver know they have a new message?
How does the driver know the difference between a message they’ve read/haven’t read?
I knew visual cues would help to make all of these things more clear later on, but wanted to make sure the structure worked in black and white first.
Rough sketches
Solution & Outcomes
The design of the Message Center itself had been informed by those initial wireframes— the only additional step from there was applying visual styles from our design system, aptly named ‘Cookbook’, as well as working with the engineers on documentation for the logic of the inbox. But what would the messages themselves look like? For this I worked with marketing to understand what they need the messages to do; the different kinds of content they would need to contain. From there I designed several templates which established a content hierarchy, image areas, and character limits.
Inbox logic
General template and guidelines
Slideshow & Interstitial templates
Live campaign examples
Our data from 2021 showed that drivers were tapping through to message center comms at around a 30% higher rate than email and push notifications for the same campaign. Which makes sense; with emails and push we’re competing with all of the other emails and push notifications a driver gets on a weekly basis. But message center allows us to meet drivers where they already are.