Improving restaurant order tracking

Just Eat's growth depended on small kitchens and busy counters. When a rider app, phone line, and multiple aggregators all compete for attention, staff pick the tablet that makes the next step clear. Orderpad could accept orders, but it often failed to show where each ticket sat in the flow, when food needed to be ready for handoff, or what tapping On Its Way committed to downstream. Teams worked around those gaps, and the cost showed up as late deliveries, support calls, and poor reviews.

Teams also needed Partner Centre tasks (hours, radius, pricing, cancellations) without leaving the tablet during service. That gap affected live operations, not just convenience. Just Eat needed an outside-in read before committing roadmap and engineering effort.

I structured the audit around six Nielsen-based review areas: system status, fit for kitchen work, control and speed, recognition over recall, layout clarity, and error recovery. I applied the same rubric to Just Eat, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and SkipTheDishes so results were directly comparable.

I combined product walkthroughs, competitor analysis, partner surveys, and in-restaurant observations during live service. That gave us evidence from both interface behavior and real operating conditions (noise, rush periods, multilingual teams). The output was one scoring sheet, short theme briefs with screenshots, and a prioritized readout that separated quick fixes from business-level decisions.

Across Deliveroo, Grubhub, Uber Eats, SkipTheDishes, and Just Eat, the combined heuristic roll-up put Orderpad last. That was uncomfortable in the room, but it replaced opinion with one curve everyone could point to: the gap ran across status, fit to kitchen reality, control, and recovery, not a single bad icon.

Partner research gave the business hard counts to fund against. In-product surveys showed 82% of partners rated reaching Partner Centre from Orderpad as important, and 56% wanted a clearer view of drivers on busy nights (while optional driver tooling sat at almost no adoption next to rivals who ship live tracking by default). Those numbers turned "they keep asking" into backlog pressure with a size on it.

Nothing in an audit ships pixels by itself. What shipped was clarity: a ranked set of themes, a cut between work that could ride normal release cadence and work that needed brand or policy concessions, and constraints spelled out in the deck so roadmap bets matched what ops could open and what contracts allowed.