Dello

Typical Wednesday morning in PES University, Ring Road Campus, Bengaluru.

Consumer-facing web app. We worked within several constraints that were unique to Dello — poor connection quality, sub-minute changes in stock availability, room-level precision for delivery selection, etc. We also had to accommodate low trust and high falloff by reducing customer input fields, reducing cart steps and prioritizing cash-on-delivery. In the screenshots, you’ll also see the use of colloquial terms referencing items, as students related to “Orange Lays” over “Lay’s West Indies Hot ‘n’ Sweet Chili”.

Delivery partner-facing product. This design was extremely vital as we looked at scaling up our operations to more floors, blocks and universities. The delivery interface was designed to prevent stale orders (>2 min.), keep things easy-to-parse when a partner is on-the-move and automate actions that did not need the partner’s intervention (like accepting orders). We also implemented a simple system so delivery partners could confirm their attendance for the next day quickly, allowing us to adapt with substitutes if necessary.

Admin-facing product. Restocking the bag that the delivery partner would carry during break hours is a manual task that needed to be done daily by a block manager. We designed a mobile app to help facilitate this through restocking templates to ensure consistency between bags, status updates to track a large scale of bags, and higher-level stock alerts if more inventory needed to be acquired.

iPad app, consumer-facing. This was created as a part of our pilot GTM strategy. It proved very difficult to get customers to open the Dello web app on their own, so our sales strategy became very simple — my co-founder would walk around our target floors with an iPad app, asking people if they wanted to order snacks. When they placed the order through the iPad, I walked over to that class and delivered it. The magic of the 90-second delivery got people to convert into web app customers and stick around from then on. This strategy proved extremely effective and was the key to our 164% week-on-week growth.