A Food App that Works Better for Everyone
A detailed look into the product design and features of the online ordering app, Vittles
Note: I’ve already covered the part about no service fees and the rewards system built into the platform in another post. It’s not necessary to read unless you’re interested in getting a picture of how much you’ll save by using Vittles over other apps.
Tempting as it is, I’m not going to name other apps, but I do want it to be clear that just about all of the features that have gone into Vittles were designed in direct response to consistently unaddressed feedback in other apps — unaddressed largely because it doesn’t have to be when you’re a company listed on the stock exchange.
This is a detailed overview of some features that Vittles offers that improve the diner experience in meaningful ways. I’m looking forward to all of the feedback you may have as well as requests for features that would further increase the value you get out of the app. Vittles is a small team (one person), but development for reasonable things can be quite fast.
And now, the tour!
Restaurants are ordered by menu quality
Let’s say you’re browsing Vittles with all the patience of a hungry NYer whose train home got stuck in the tunnel for 10 minutes. You open the app and search for “dumplings”.
On other apps, you’d simply see a list of restaurants that have items with the word “dumpling” in them, starting with restaurants that paid for priority listing and the most exposure.
On Vittles, restaurants in search results are ordered by menu quality. I define “menu quality” as:
How easy the restaurant makes it for you to make an informed, confident decision.
When a restaurant fills in item descriptions, dietary restrictions, calories, and adds images to their menu, they rank higher in the results than those who don’t. The more info they provide to you, the higher up they show.
There are two great reasons for doing this:
- When you’re hungry, there’s nothing worse than waiting 45–50 minutes only for food to arrive and not even come close to what you envisioned because all you knew was that you were ordering “soup dumpling (6 ct)”.
- You might be willing to try something new if you had more insight into what new thing you are trying (i.e. pictures, description, etc).
The most popular apps simply can’t do this because they charge restaurants a “marketing fee” (and other fees) to be given priority placement in the search results. The results you’d see on other apps are effectively paid listings. Restaurants that pay more are shown to more customers. This means that in order for them to make their search results as diner-friendly as Vittles, they’d have to alter their business model in a way that would make them less money. This is unlikely to happen.
The most helpful and accurate diet filtering
One thing unique to Vittles is that its search is designed to be as helpful as possible to anyone who might be using the app. To accomplish this, Vittles has three different modes of search: No Diet, Strict, and Tolerant.
When searching with No Diet enabled, results are sorted by menu quality (see previous section). If you search for “pizza” you’ll see restaurants that serve pizza in order of highest menu quality to lowest.
The other two modes of search, Strict and Tolerant, are meant for use with dietary preferences and restrictions. To adjust your dietary preferences, tap the white button next to the search bar, then tap any or all dietary preferences that apply to you (or your group, if you’re ordering for multiple people).
Once you save these preferences, these diets will remain active until you turn them off, or search using No Diet. This is to make it easier to find the food you’re looking for in the future. So long as you have these enabled, the app knows to adhere to this. For example, searching for “pizza” with “Vegan” active will still search for vegan pizza even though you didn’t type the word “vegan” in your search.
Searching in Strict mode is for when you have multiple dietary preferences, and you’re looking for food that meets all of these preferences. For example, if you enable vegetarian and gluten-free diets, and then search for “sandwich”, you will see results only from restaurants that offer a sandwich that is both vegetarian and gluten-free.
Given the same scenario, Tolerant mode will work slightly different. If you search for “sandwich” in Tolerant mode, you would now see restaurants that offer sandwiches that are either vegetarian or gluten-free, not necessarily both.
Regardless of the mode you search with, restaurants are ordered by how accommodating they are for your specific diet. The more items they have that meet your needs, the higher they show up in search results (one of the benefits of not using ad-based listings!).
All of this is nice, but sometimes you don’t know what food you want — you just know what restrictions the food has to adhere to. In this case, you can simply enable the relevant preferences and search by entering a single asterisk “*”. This is the equivalent of saying “any food that meets these requirements”. This is also useful for when you could eat several different things, but you don’t want to search individually for each food term.
Virtual Kitchen standards
In keeping with the theme of helping diners make informed decisions, when browsing the menu of a virtual/ghost kitchen, you will very clearly see that it is a virtual kitchen.
We took this a step further, and have set it up so that any kitchens associated with the same concept are actually easy to determine. We did this for three reasons:
- If you’re vegan, we understand that you’d prefer not to order from a place that uses the same surfaces upon which meat was prepared. We get it. And so we want to make it so that you’re able to make as informed a decision as possible.
- If you don’t like the food from one virtual kitchen, you don’t have to worry about mistakenly ordering from that same virtual kitchen under a different name.
- If a kitchen were to close down due to low reviews, you’d still easily be able to tell if your food is prepared by that same business.
It’s both frustrating and unnecessary to order from a place without transparency around the ordering process. I’ll keep my promise to not name other apps, but I want to highlight that one does not need to be a genius engineer to implement this. You just need to give a damn. Like actually, though.
That concludes the tour of features. I hope you saw something you’re looking forward to using as you support local restaurants in New York City. There are quite a few things in the works for upcoming improvements to the app. As promised on the website, Vittles VIP users are the people I’ll be talking to first when it comes to demoing and getting feedback, but any feedback from anyone is welcome!
