The UberEATS app is now able to recommend individual dishes at establishments based on a number of metrics including a user’s previous preferences, and can also keep track of favorite restaurants and dishes, and show them first in searches. Other new features of the app include a ranking system that shows a user the most recent community rankings for a given establishment when searching, along with a thumbs up or thumbs down for individual dishes. This change also shares ratings with restaurant owners in the same way, helping them to get up-to-date feedback on a near-constant basis.
These changes to the ratings system and searching are designed to get both users and restaurants more involved in the app’s community and ratings systems. Users will see the latest ratings and recommendations based on community data and their own favorites, and restaurants will see a wealth of new data in their dashboards concerning search rankings, result hits, and ratings. Once a customer goes into a restaurant in the app, dish recommendations are based on a mix of other users’ ratings of dishes, the user’s history with similar dishes, and what’s going on in the user’s current session. This means that the app can help a user decide between ordering seafood or beef from a Chinese restaurant, or pizza or pasta from an Italian restaurant, for example.
This change is part of a larger overarching initiative by Uber to be more user-friendly. With former CEO Travis Kalanick replaced during the company’s 180 Days Of Change campaign, new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wasted no time in rearranging the company culture, making life easier for drivers, and reworking the core Uber experience and things like UberEATS to be easier to use and more useful. Khosrowshahi’s humble approach has some analysts predicting that the company could be headed for a rough patch, with Uber performing what seems to be a complete turnaround in many aspects of how it operates at a core level. Only time will tell exactly what changes the new CEO will want to make over time, so it’s hard to predict right now just how easy or hard things may get for Uber going forward.
