Redesigning order management at marketplace scale

Go Delivery is the order management system restaurant partners use to receive, track, and fulfill orders — at a scale (500K+ restaurants worldwide) where "the user" isn't one persona, it's every kind of kitchen operation from a single food stall to a multi-location chain. Mobile and web had drifted into two inconsistent experiences, and the existing interface didn't reflect how orders actually move through a real kitchen during a rush.

Rather than designing from assumptions about restaurant operations, I led UX research directly in the field — visiting 12 locations across Malaysia to observe how orders were actually managed during service. That grounding mattered: the mental model kitchens used to track an order's status didn't map cleanly onto the platform's existing screens, and no amount of remote user interviews would have surfaced that gap as clearly as watching it happen during an actual rush.

The redesign organized orders into a swimlane-based system — new, in progress, ready, completed — mirroring the stages an order actually passes through in a kitchen, rather than the platform's internal data model. That shift alone did more to reduce cognitive load during a rush than any individual screen-level improvement.

Mobile and web were unified into one consistent experience, so a restaurant partner could move between devices — checking orders from a phone during prep, switching to a tablet at the counter — without relearning the interface each time.

The swimlane-based redesign was preferred by 85% of users in field testing against the previous interface, and shipped as a single, unified experience across mobile and web — replacing two drifting versions of the product with one.