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.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/d2a146dd-8b90-45cf-87c8-01e67ecf842c.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
A powerful, unique capability of Uber's system is that entities can be reused across different configurations.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/6771e561-6ed4-4bd3-91a1-050e8bf6d9d2.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/ac236381-7779-487a-a252-87714077df69.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/6bfe3fa8-32de-4d7d-9a90-598fa6113fa5.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
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.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/1e9d922a-510a-4559-b836-c54ca6db5825.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/b3d861aa-3809-43fc-879b-9ce1935913ea.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
I explored a variety of alternative layouts that could enable more efficient editing. We recognized a trade-off between efficiency and clarity.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/a0d766e0-5556-4fe5-867e-ad26c0a96b35.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/dc08c96e-8576-42de-9363-6fb3f4baec98.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/497ae01e-eeda-42ad-bd05-766748ff96df.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/a13405b9-1812-4bbf-9f3a-46f7b300ecf2.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)
Through research and iteration, we landed on the side panel format that we moved forward with:
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/NV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2/01wV7WvYDJiaFGdXIaRf/022589af-66b3-4c12-936d-7b330bc14830.png?_a=DATC1RfiZAA0)