Delivering lives
A case study on and for delivery app workers, developed during Tera ‘s Digital Product Leadership course in 2020, with Carolina G. Luditza. This article was originally posted in Portuguese on Nov/20, and it talks about the working conditions encountered in the Brazilian workspace.
Have you ever imagined what it’s like to work for more than 10 hours a day without even having anywhere to do your most basic needs, like drinking water or going to the bathroom, and still not knowing how much you’ll be able to get out at the end of the day? That’s the reality of most application delivery workers.
Because of that, when we observed the growing "Uberisation" of work and the protests in the period of the pandemic Covid-19, in which application delivery demanded improvements to the class, we decided to delve into the topic during the project.
In a survey conducted by the Journal of Labor and Human Development it was found that during the pandemic, 62% of workers were working more than 9 hours a day with 51.9% working 7 days a week.
Challenge: How can we help app deliverers who are dissatisfied with the current landscape that delivery platforms provide?
Based on the main demands of the protests, our initial expectation was to develop a solution that would bring greater stability to the delivery worker’s job — something that proved to be more complex than we imagined.
Below is the matrix where we raised the certainties, doubts and hypotheses we had when starting the project (which was later complemented by inputs from the surveys):
There is no lack of available material on the subject. From articles on various news portals, surveys, videos made by the delivery workers themselves, to documentaries. Most of them discuss the precariousness of work, "Uberization" and the situation stressed by the pandemic that culminated in the protests.
One of them is the short documentary “Lives delivered”. It talks about food app deliverers (iFood, Rappi, Uber) who work by bicycle:
After collecting the data in a secondary research and building our hypothesis Matrix, we continued the research/discovery phase by interviewing 8 delivery workers who helped us to understand the real problems in this context, such as:
- Income unpredictability.
“When the demand is good, we take advantage and work up to 16 hours, to be sure, because we don’t know if tomorrow will be good again.”
- Lack of support from the delivery company (even when they are disconnected from the platform for no clear reason).
- Waiting time at the restaurant until an order comes out and then at the customer until they pick it up.
- Lack of quality of life due to spending too much time on the street and consequently little time with the family.
- They do not have support spots (water, shelter, etc…).
“The apps should provide a support spot for us, because we are on the street, there is no bathroom, there is no place to stop and wait for orders… there had to be support for us to be able to drink water, have a table for lunch . We sit on the sidewalk so we can eat. Even a place to charge your cell phone is difficult to find.”
Recording of the interviews conducted with delivery workers:
Next, we spoke with 4 restaurants (owners and managers). It is clear that the biggest dissatisfaction is the amount of fees charged by the applications, which can reach up to 30% of the order value. However, despite this discontent, they remain working with the applications because if they stop, the number of orders drops dramatically.
“The demand from iFood is better, we’re kind of dependent on them.”
There were also issues related to the lack of transparency in the communication with the platforms, the mismatch between the order being ready to leave and the time the delivery worker arrives (either before or after) and the loss of orders (which generates a certain distrust in the relationship between restaurant and delivery).
Here we show all the problems found (workers, in red, and restaurants in green):
Persona: Marcos — 32-year-old man, low class and only family income
After the interviews, we were able to draw the Persona and journey of our user, the delivery worker.
“It is necessary to take advantage of the opportunities that appear to achieve what I want for me and my family”
Since losing his job 8 months ago, Marcos has found a way to support himself through the apps. Although his journey is flexible, he usually follows the same routine every day: he wakes up at around 7 am and has breakfast, a moment he shares in the company of his wife and child.
At around 9 am, it leaves Grajaú towards Interlargos, a journey which takes approximately 30 minutes. After traveling a distance of approximately 13 kilometers, it is positioned at strategic points such as the mall, gas stations or the market in the region.
Usually, around 11 am, the first orders start to arrive. The last ones do not have much forecast, as he only returns home after reaching his daily goal, which is around U$35.00 to U$50.00. To achieve this goal, he works about 12 hours a day, but if he notices that the day is paying off, he spends more time on the street:
As “time is money”, he feels anguished when he is idle, something that happens quite often whether he is waiting for orders to arrive, dishes to be prepared, or customers to receive them. This means wasting more time on the street and less time with family.
Despite these breaks, Marcos cannot reconcile them with moments when he could rest and get ready to prepare for the next deliveries, whether stretching his legs, eating or even charging his cell phone. For that, it only counts on the good will of the people who work in the restaurants.
At the same time that Marcos likes to work autonomously, because he feels free, he would like some support from platforms and restaurants, after all, he feels that the hard work is what he is doing.
We mapped the entire delivery journey during a working day, with the aim of helping to understand where solution proposals would come in:
After analyzing all the results, we have proposed a solution that was viable for the platforms to consider and that attended both, the deliverers and the restaurants, a program of support spots.
In this canvas "Product Vision Board" we give the vision of what we are trying to propose as a solution to some of the identified problems:
The idea is that the platform creates a program where restaurants could register as partner support spots, inserting the benefits that they can and want to offer, such as water, restrooms, food, space to charge the cell phone, etc. In return, these restaurants would receive benefits such as a percentage reduction in the amount of order fees, or periods with reduced delivery values.
For the restaurant, in addition to monetary benefits, the proposal also aims to build a better relationship with delivery workers, since when they request benefits, their profile would be displayed to the attendant.
On the worker’s side, the benefit is evident. Not only for moments between deliveries, but also when they need to wait for the order to be ready, having a better prepared space to receive them.
Finally, for platforms, we believe it would be a solution with high potential to make restaurants and delivery workers more satisfied, increasing the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and consequently with both more satisfied, end customers would have a better experience — everyone wins .
Below we list all the benefits mapped for all involved points:
We then worked on a prototype of how the solution could materialize, from the worker’s perspective:
If you work for a delivery platform and are interested in talking to us to exchange what we learned, we are very open to that! Just get in touch through my LinkedIn.
Main takeaways
- There is a lot that happens behind the scenes after a simple tap to finalize a food order in a delivery app.
- Knowing the routine of the people who do the delivery service helped us to further value this precarious work that is increasingly present today.
- How inattention to one or more ends of a chain can affect the rest of the chain.
- And finally, as in the quest to introduce new services into our lives, companies cannot fail to look at the most basic needs of those involved.
References and recommended materials
- Documentaries: Documentaries about working for platforms
- Article: UX study to improve the quality of work of Brazilian day laborers
- Feature: Documentary discusses the precariousness after the reform
- Feature: GREG NEWS | DELIVERY
- Research: Working conditions of delivery people via digital platform during Covid-19
- Feature: Discover the challenges of a delivery person during a pandemic period
- Documentary: GIG — A Uberização do Trabalho (Trailer)
- Documentary: VIDAS ENTREGUES
