Tag: branding

Yesterday I saw an FB post and a tweet pointing to something called the MKDabbawala. I was intrigued. It had the same branding colors thankfully of yellow and orange and the same MK letters in the same font. So atleast I thought, it was the same brand.

• But What is that tiffin carrier doing in the logo? Are they pivoting? They are moving away from restaurant style business to regular home delivery, or something similar? These were the thoughts that were going through my mind.

And then I went to their website. First look, well, it looked better than what it looked before. Fresh, clean start. I started poking around.

• The first dissonance hit me right away. On the masthead was both the new logo and the old one. Uh. What? And then I saw the small text “Powered by”. So, they were not pivoting by adding a new feature. I guessed that, other than the restaurant service, they were probably introducing a new tiffin carrier service.
• But then, why is the new service such a prominent part of the masthead and on the main page.
• Fine, I went along. Ok, so my next thought was, they are rebranding into ‘ordinary food’ (which is probably delivery only and in a tiffin carrier?) and ‘special food; (probably only in restaurants, but perhaps delivery too). Fair enough. I know several people who eat regularly at MK.
• Awright, keep moving, keep moving. Lets have what they have on offer. The ‘difference’ between these two foods are (and yes, they are putting two things side by side, which by cognitive theory means, they are comparing. Or, arnt they?)

 

• Menu on the dabba thing changes very day. Nice. Oh it is super fast delivery – faster than normal?. And I thought the traditional flavors thing was a common thing across all MK dishes. We will let that slip. Perhaps the right hand column has more exotic stuff.
• Wide range of North Indian food and memories of home –  Hmm. OK. Again I thought was across the board. Every dish made to order. So the dabba things are pre-prepared? What?
• Lets move on to how to order.

 

• So the dabba is delivery and hence can be ordered by app or website. And the other ‘regular’ or ‘exotic’ stuff (I cant make up my mind), you can either get it delivered or eat in the restaurant. Fair enough. I can wrap my mind around that.
• Let us try ordering some tiffin carrier food. I clicked on the left card.
• And a new tab opened. Firstly, I am not a big fan of you opening tabs for me. Show it to me on the same page. In 2 minutes flat on perusing your webpage, this was what my tabs was like. I have enough tabs that I open, and I dont want three more.

• I like the high level look and feel of this page when it opens. It shows “Aaj ka dabba” – which is for non-hindi-speakers, “Todays dabba” or “Todays selection”. I would not harp on the Hindi, because Mast Kalandar’s target audience has always been North Indians living in South India. Let us not make a pretense out of it. And I see nothing wrong in it. It is a large market, and they are focused.
• There are 6 things in todays dabba, where I can choose from. The mouse-overs explain the dishes. I have a minor problem with the text. I think it should be more explanatory. Do not say, bite into parathas. I want to know whether there is going to be one paratha or two. I want to order here. Same goes for the rest of the dishes as well. The only thing that had count was the laddoo. When I read the description, I want the text to help me decide whether I can finish the dish or not, if I am hungry enough for it or not.
• Also, please make the page responsive (get the target screen-size and resize with respect to that – yes, it can be done). THere are six dishes and I still need to scroll down just a bit  because the last row is only 80% displayed. Typically this UX behavior is only reserved if you have more stuff coming below. There is one unnecessary scroll down that was waster.

• So I click on an Order button. It asks me for City and area. Currently it is only Bangalore and Koramangala. It is 6:30 in the morning here, as I write this, and it nicely says that the restaurant is closed now, but I can pre-order. Nice touch.

 

• I click on pre-order, and I am presented with the daily menu. Nice and clean. I like the fact, you see the cart in the same screen. The only minor nit that I have is the plus (+) sign in a square. Traditionally this is reserved for an expander. So you might have people clicking on it to see if there is more text on the menu item. For this, typically you may want to use the “+” within a circle.
• And where did this green and yellow come from? So far away from your brand colors. It is definitely a bit jarring at first glance.
• Dear webdeveloper who did the order details page, there must be a better way to validate if the person has ordered something or not, than this:

• So I chose something and clicked on ‘Order. There are a couple of things that I really like in this next screen.

 

• I love it that you can log-in or order as a guest. Love it that you can order for now, or for later. I guess this is inspiration from the many taxi-apps that we have these days. And wow, I can order upto 2-3 days in advance. Nice. I don’t think anyone else has this. You should market the hell out of this feature. It is now so hidden in there.
• The tool tips make no sense at all. And I cannot figure out which field is mandatory and which is not.

 

• And aaaargh, the scrolling. Please, make the page responsive. I do not want to scroll for 2 more lines. There is so much white space that you can utilize here, and yet look clean.
• I fill in some junk in some of the boxes and hit continue. And then it tells me the mandatory fields. There is now a red ‘i’ in the two more boxes, which never existed before.

 

 

• The form validation is all messed up. I tried giving various wrong combinations, and it always pointed to the wrong fields and kept saying “Please enter all fields”. Not very helpful, nor accurate.
• I like the “Bring change for ” feature. It could be a little more explanatory though. And if you are going to have only COD, why have a step called “Payment Options”. If you are going to have more payment options coming up, say so (More Payment options coming up).
• And hey, why cannot I pay using loyalty points? You have my log in details.
• And whoa, I did something wrong, back button or something, and I cannot find my cart now. No option to go back to my cart? Where is the options icon now? I just noticed it is not present in the menu. And when I go back to the main menu, I still do not see a view cart button anywhere. Ok. Big Bummer here.
• Ok. I now have to click on one of the Order Now buttons in the menu to get to the cart.
• I am now officially done with the Daily dabba. And I still fully cannot wrap my head around the ‘dabba’ concept. Nothing in my experience above seems to indicate it is anything new. I do not see a tiffin carrier service here at all. No repetitive ordering/monthly payment option. It is a smaller menu.

Let us get to the “Full Menu”. You can get to the full menu either from the dabba page or from the main page. This is fair, because I may find the dabba menu too restrictive and I want to see more. (And please do not put Aur Dikhao, please please).

• I click on the full menu (or the right card on the main page) and I see this.

 

• The three dots show me that there are three images that you are cycling through. Ok. But should you not be cycling them yourself? A marquee scroll plug-in if you will? I should not have to do search for the small ‘white’ right/left arrow to go see the next image. And, in a good UX page, the arrow buttons are never always visible, they come up when you mouse over to that area.
• Also every one of your three images spills over to your left. You have so much space left, why cut your images. Alignment problems I think.
• I thought you only had types of menus – “Aaj ka dabba” and “Full menu”. What is the express menu? Where did that pop up? Is that the same as the dabba menu?
• Ok, I want to see the menu. I keep searching, menu, menu, menu .. where are you menu … cmon out kitty …
• What! You need to click on Order now, and only then can you see the menu? Oh cmon, MastK, you can do better than that. This is almost real-estate agent tactics. “Nahin Sir, Cant get the keys to the flat unless you commit.”
• Ok, I stumble past the Order Now.
• I now have to give my city and location again, else, you wont show me the menu.

 

• Ok. Nice and clean, again. Same feedback about the plus in the square though.
• Also, my preference – if you are going to showing categories, show only the items in the highlighted category in the second column.
• Have another item called “Show me All” and show all the items there. Again, my cognitive dissonance may be different from yours.
• I see the dissonating green color permeating here as well. Whats up with the new brand color?
• No pictures for these items? If you can show pictures for your dabba menu, why not atleast a mouse-hover or a picture icon, where I can click and see what I want to get? A Bengali person might want to see how the Litti Chokha is, right? You may want to think about that.
• And what is this “HD” acronym that I see everywhere in the menu?
• I think there is spacing issues in your menu css. The first bits are fine.

• But then when you go down to the ala carte items, the spacing seems to have gone out of whack (too much white space in my opinion). The screen itself is a contained screen. Clicking on the arrow

 

• Also what is this upwards facing green arrow. I clicked and understood that it is “Scroll up to top.” In some pages, it makes sense. I still do not think that it is very intuitive. There are other established ways to do that.
• There are pages with the green arrow, that do not need it – like the payments page. The page itself is a contained page. When I click the arrow, it just bumps me up a couple of lines.

 

• There was just one more thing that I wanted to test. The more options menu in the main page. Firstly, this should be everywhere – in every page. Secondly, please add a “My Cart” option here.

 

• Order online takes you through all of the above stuff I spoke about.
• The Food love story and the Chefs corner is fine – but very sparsely populated.
• I clicked on Store Locator. And that is when I realized MastKalandar had only one store in India, in Koramangala, Bangalore.

 

• Guys – if the page is not finished yet, put a “beta sticker” on it. Or atleast, say “In construction”. Cmon. This is so not done.
• And what the heck is the feedback form doing in the Locate Us page?
• And I did not expect much from the Contact Us page, either and it did not disappoint.

• I do not know about you, but I cannot figure this one out. Ok. You are giving me your corporate address and phone and email address. And a “Get Directions” to your Corporate office. Really?
• And is that a feedback form to the right? You should put a sub label tag on it – “Write to us” or something like that.

In summary:

• Noble effort to try and change the previous website (which sucked big time). New cleaner page. Several nice new features. There are UX nits that I have highlighted above. Sincere advise to the web-guys. If you are not done testing the website, please do not release it. Or put a beta sticker on it. Or put a “Under construction” sign somewhere.
• More importantly, I think the branding theme needs to be fixed. This Dabba thing is too confusing. It seems to be deviating from what you are. Just call it express (or daily menu) and full menu. Too much shock to the consumer is also not good.
• I just noticed one more thing. And perhaps this could perhaps be the most important non-technical non-UX thing in this post. There are 4 branding perspectives you are confusing the user with here.

 

• In branding, logos, fonts, taglines/bylines are sacred.