Chris Lee
Chris Lee

Menu Maker

In 2020, I redesigned the Uber Eats menu management tool.

Among the tools Uber Eats provides to merchants, our menu management tool is one of my most frequently used - but it's also likely the most complex.

Menus between merchants can vary widely - from a local Chinese spot with 150 dishes to a poke bowl shop that offers a few items with lots of customization.

To support all these types of menus, our system has a a powerful back-end structure of entities that can be connected to one another to create a menu.

A powerful, unique capability of Uber's system is that entities can be reused across different configurations.

An item can be featured in multiple categories
A modifier group (customization) can be reused across multiple items
An item can even be used as a modifier option within a combo item

While powerful, this structure isn't necessarily intuitive. The prior version of the tool echoed this back-end entity structure in the front-end. Each type of entity had to be set up on its own database-like screen and then attached to other entities to form a menu.

We heard from merchants that the tool was confusing and inefficient.

Prior version: Entities were listed in a tabular format without hierarchy
Prior version: Common actions like editing an item required navigating between different pages

I explored a variety of alternative layouts that could enable more efficient editing. We recognized a trade-off between efficiency and clarity.

A table format optimized for efficiency
A card format optimized for resemblance to the consumer menu experience
An inline expansion format
A side panel format - which we ultimated moved forward with

Through research and iteration, we landed on the side panel format that we moved forward with:

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