Reimagining Zomato: Building Next-Gen Features Through Design Thinking & User Research
Updated: Aug 20, 2025
As part of our Product Management & Marketing course project, our team set out to reimagine Zomato not just as a food delivery app, but as a holistic lifestyle and dining ecosystem.
The objective was clear: identify real-world pain points in dining and ordering, validate them through user research, and design innovative features that could make Zomato more useful, engaging, and inclusive for its diverse user base.
This project enabled us to integrate design thinking, customer research, and UI prototyping into a seamless, end-to-end product innovation journey.
Feature Ideation
We began by brainstorming 8 innovative concepts that could enhance Zomato’s value proposition for users:
Bill Splitting: Split group dining payments seamlessly.
Pay-for-Portion: Pay only for what you eat, not the entire dish.
Cuisine Token Rewards: Gamified rewards for exploring new cuisines.
ZomatoChat: Peer reviews & social dining discussions.
Locality Personalization: Recommendations tailored to your area.
Dish Recommendation Based on Nutrition: Provide Calorie, protein, and sugar details to get a dish suggestion.
Religious & Ritual Food Finder: Filter by dietary/religious preferences.
Daily Meal Subscription: Affordable, home-style meals for professionals/students.
These ideas targeted gaps in group dining, health consciousness, personalization, and loyalty engagement.
User Research with Kano Survey
To avoid building features in a vacuum, we used the Kano Model survey to gather feedback from 100+ users.
The survey asked participants to rate their preference for each feature and classify them as:
Must-Haves (basic expectations),
Delighters (unexpected but exciting), or
Indifferent (low value).
This validation exercise gave us a clear picture of what mattered most to Zomato’s user base.
From 8 initial ideas, the top 4 features emerged as clear winners:
Final MVP: Top 4 Features with UI/UX Journey
After validating our ideas through the Kano survey, we finalized 4 core features for the MVP. To bring them alive, we designed 20+ UI screens that captured the complete user flow, ensuring each feature was practical, delightful, and consistent with Zomato’s design language.
Bill Splitting
Problem: Splitting payments in group dining or shared delivery orders is often messy.
Solution: Zomato integrates a seamless split bill option, allowing users to divide costs instantly within the app.
Diet-Based Dish Recommendation
Problem: Health-conscious users lack visibility while searching for dishes based on a diet plan.
Solution: A nutrition form lets users sort dishes by calories, protein, sugar, or diet type (e.g., keto, vegan).
Daily Meal Subscription
Problem: Students and working professionals struggle with affordable, reliable daily meals.
Solution: Zomato offers a subscription model with customizable daily meal plans at affordable prices.
Cuisine Token Rewards
Problem: Loyalty programs often fail to feel engaging or fun.
Solution: A gamified token-based reward system for trying new cuisines encourages users to explore and return.
By combining feature ideation with user-centric UI design, we ensured these MVP features solved real user problems while delivering an engaging, frictionless experience.
Learnings & Reflection
This project was more than just a classroom exercise it was a hands-on simulation of product discovery.
Validated Ideas First: The Kano survey taught us to prioritize based on user needs, not assumptions.
Design Thinking in Action: From ideation → research → prototyping, the process guided us seamlessly.
Balance Is Key: Practical features drive adoption, but delight features build engagement.
Most importantly, we learned that building a product isn’t about adding features it’s about solving problems in meaningful, user-centric ways.
Conclusion
This project was more than just an assignment; it was a hands-on journey through product discovery, user research, and design execution.
By starting with user pain points, validating ideas through the Kano framework, and finally visualizing them with intuitive UI, we reimagined Zomato as more than a food delivery app, as a complete lifestyle companion for dining, health, and social experiences.
For us as aspiring product managers, the biggest takeaway was that great products don’t emerge from brainstorming alone. They come from listening, testing, refining, and aligning user value with business value.
If Zomato were to adopt features like bill splitting, diet-based dish recommendations, meal subscriptions, and gamified rewards, it could significantly strengthen retention, drive engagement, and expand its ecosystem, proving that even small changes, when user-centric, can lead to outsized impact.
On a personal note, this project honed my ability to:
Translate research into actionable insights,
Apply frameworks like Kano for prioritization, and
Think through the end-to-end user journey in design.
It’s these experiences that remind me why I’m passionate about product management: because at the core, it’s not about building features, it’s about shaping experiences that matter.
