By Ryan Scott, Senior Product Designer and Kiran Divvela, Head of Content
Over the past few weeks you may have noticed some enticing new photos popping up on menu pages across DoorDash. These photos are part of an effort to dramatically change the way both customers and restaurants relate to our products: by adding food photography to the core DoorDash experience.
As of today there are now more than 10,000 delicious food photos on DoorDash representing more than 1,300 restaurants across 25+ markets. You can browse these photos by clicking the “Most Loved” section at the top of these restaurants’ menus. But this project was much more than just snapping photos with our iPhones. It took planning, testing and an all out sprint to provide, a beautiful, consistent and mouth-watering experience every time you look at a menu. Given the complexity, we wanted to share how we approached this challenge to make your DoorDash experience picture perfect every time.
A photo is worth 1,000 words, but food photography can truly capture what words can’t
Food photography, like food delivery, is incredibly difficult to get right. We wanted to provide a variety of images so that you could get a good sense for the menu and more easily discover new dishes. At the same time, we needed to provide incredibly high quality images to help differentiate between the wide variety of restaurants we offer on the platform.
Delicious photography can create an almost instantaneous reaction, signaling to your brain, “Mmm, I want to eat that.” But that powerful first impression can be a double-edged sword. Humans are hard-wired to be extremely critical of food for one very basic reason: if something looks off, the food might make us sick (or worse). To make sure we were providing the most authentic images possible, high quality elements like lighting, color, and composition weren’t just nice-to-have stylistic details for these photos — they were critical elements that could make or break the experience and had to be accounted for in every shoot.
To meet both these needs, we had to focus on both quality AND scale.
To achieve both quality and scale, we worked with our restaurant partners to showcase a variety of items on their menu. At DoorDash our mission is to empower local merchants, and our photos process is no exception. Thanks to our strong relationships with restaurants, we asked them to select their most popular items to be photographed. When they were unsure about which items to pick, we used our data analytics to share which items are the most popular on DoorDash and have the highest delivery quality. Once the items were selected, our professional food photographers collaborated with restaurants to ensure that the food was presented in the best light and the shoot was optimized for quality and speed.
More science than art
As we built out the DoorDash photos effort, our team was very intentional when it came to designing the “experience” of photography, focusing on how the brain perceives food and leveraging data from millions of deliveries to determine which items would be the best to recommend.
Photos should help your experience, not make it more complicated, so we made food the hero of every image by eliminating as many distractions as possible and allowing people to focus just on the item at the center of the photo. At the same time, we wanted to create an experience that is authentic to how people truly interact with their food. We tried to incorporate elements of the restaurant that are unique to its presentation such as the table, plate, garnish, and more. Similarly, when people eat food, they don’t look at their food top down or straight on, but rather at an angle, similar to how our photos are taken.
Bringing customers and local businesses together
At the end of the day, we wanted to make the experience of exploring new restaurants and ordering from a different place as delightful as possible. Combined with features like our Delight Score, having high quality, authentic photos makes it easier than ever to find something new and trust that what you’re ordering is what you’re craving. And by developing a unique visual style and individually photographing each dish – rather than simply using the same California Roll photo for every sushi restaurant, for example – you can now flick through photos and instantly understand a restaurant’s point of view.
Adding more than ten thousand beautiful images to DoorDash in four weeks was no easy feat, but was the best way to bring restaurants and customers together. Helping you you order something delicious, even when daring to try something new, while empowering local restaurants is what motivates us every day at DoorDash.
Check out the new “Most Loved” section at the top of menus across DoorDash to see these photos today. And keep an eye out for even more photos being added from your favorite restaurants in the weeks and months to come.