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Comment by fredsted | Hacker News Reader

Here in Denmark, Wolt started taking off recently, and these days you see Wolt couriers delivering food constantly. Over the last 10 years, I've several hundred orders on Just-Eat, but due to the improved UX of the Wolt app, I've now switched to it completely.

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Me and my colleagues frequently discus how bad the UX of Wolt is, and how our favorite is the old-school hungry.dk.

Wolt is so slow and odd, and has a weird paradigm about adding copies of the same dish to the cart.

Some of the most basic things ("I want to see only pizza places that deliver to me") are not solved. What's the discovery tab even for?

I only like it (and suffer the UX) because it has live tracking of the orders. And because some restaurants are only available there.

I think people only prefer it because it looks more clean/modern, and not because it's easy to use.

Interesting that you seem to have the complete opposite experience of me. By the way, on my Discovery tab, I can scroll down a bit and click on Pizza to get a list of places that deliver pizza.

I wanted to check that out, and here's my experience.

1) Go to wolt.com. "Discovery" tab not visible. Probably have to scroll down.

2) Use web inspector to remove "noscroll" class from body. Now I can scroll.

3) Page shows general info about Wolt and how it works, but no restaurants. Fair, it probably needs my location. I'll log in so it knows where I am.

4) We had a special corporate account set up, so I can log in using a old-fashioned password. Usually people have to verify the login using the "passwordless" login thingie they have, every time they login.

5) Grey and glitchy screen with restaurant placeholders, and outline of a previous "delivery circle" notification. Spinning beachball kicks in, Safari tells me "This website is using significant energy".

6) Refresh the page and remove "noscroll" class again. Now I can click the Discover/Delivery tabs.

7) I see the Pizza section you mention in Discover. But right now all the restaurants are closed so I can't test if it does what I'm looking for. But I think the problem was that it didn't take into account which restaurants actually deliver to me right now. Or at least I don't get why I wouldn't always use the Delivery tab. I would just have designed it with one tab called "I want Food" I think :) (i.e. not two different tabs).

But generally I get a shit-ton of weird glitches and a "bloated JS app" feeling every time I order something there.

Let's hope they come to London, then.

Just last night i was marvelling at how poor the Just Eat UX is - marking an order as delivered when it wasn't, i think purely via a timeout after the scheduled delivery time, then sending me an email asking me to review the meal after i'd cancelled it!

The UX might be good. But their business would not work if they stopped using young foreigners on tourist visas. Like Uber their business model works due to taking local laws lightly.

I am not really sure why people think the model is economic. The fixed costs are huge, it is either difficult or impossible to actually offset a living wage to the delivery person if they are only fulfilling one order at a time. The only way this model works now is by hosing down restaurants (in many places right now, there is literally no choice for restaurants but to make delivery apps money). It is true, lots of these restaurants got themselves into this mess by not realising how valuable deliveries were...but...I don't understand how this is long-term viable. Paying someone EUR10 to deliver EUR20 of food makes no sense for most customers.

Couriers definitely are not only fulfilling one order at a time. As you correctly surmise, that would not be possible to do economically.

Orders are routed so that couriers pick up multiple orders, and pickups and dropoffs can be interleaved to keep multiple orders live at all times.

Local laws are most definitely not taken lightly. Labour legislation in Finland, the initial market, is very strict.

B..but they are "partners" /s

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