How We Built Safety into Uber Eats’ Ordering Experience for Customers with Allergies
Designing a structured allergy flow that reduced safety risks while maintaining seamless ordering experiences
OVERVIEW
Timeline: 6 months (2022-2023)
My Role: Co-Lead Product Designer
Team: Product Manager, Group Product Manager, 6 Engineers, 4 Legal Specialists, Content Designer, Data Analyst
Platform: iOS, Android, Web (Consumer & Merchant apps)
THE PROBLEM
Allergy information was getting lost in translation
With food safety regulations tightening globally, and growing scrutiny around allergen handling, we needed to transform how allergy information flows through our platform without disrupting the seamless ordering experience that defines Uber Eats.
Customers with food allergies faced a dangerous gap in communication when ordering through Uber Eats. Our existing “allergy-friendly” tag was a self-declared, one-sided feature, with only 4.5% adoption, and appeared on just 3.4% of global orders. Critical allergy information was often entered into special instruction fields, which busy restaurant staff frequently overlooked during peak hours. Customers and restaurants lacked a reliable way to communicate allergy information, resulting in high order defect rates and safety concerns that threatened both user trust and business growth.
How might we improve allergy communication between customers and restaurants to reduce order defects?
THE SOLUTION
A structured communication system that works for everyone
For Customers: Clear disclosure and confirmation at every step
Allergy disclosure
- Item-level allergy selection
- Pre-populated past allergy disclosures to reduce friction for repeat orders
- Clear, persistent messaging throughout the entire ordering journey
Structured communication
- Structured allergy flow rather than free-form special instructions
- Standardized, region specific allergen categories
- Option to add an unlisted allergen
For Restaurants: Prominent alerts and simple response process
Enhanced visibility
- Prominent allergy alerts on order management screens
- Dedicated allergy indication on printed tickets, prioritized
- Persistent notification throughout the process
Clear acknowledgement
- Simple workflow to accept or decline accommodation requests
- Ability to adjust the order or notify the customer if requests cannot be accommodated
- Reasoning capture when merchant cannot accommodate
The Technical Solution for Matching Restaurants to the Right Flow
Due technical limitations of some POS systems, we learned that not all merchant setups are created equal. We created an eligibility engine to determine which flow each restaurant should use based on their POS integration status, creating seamless experiences despite complex technical constraints.
- Option 1: Allergy feature flow [non-POS partners]
Restaurants without POS integrations will manage allergy requests entirely within the Uber Eats Orders app. We disable the generic “special instructions” field and replace it with a structured allergy interface. When a customer flags an allergy, the merchant sees a clear list of common allergens and must confirm whether they can accommodate the request. This guarantees every allergy note appears in the app and on printed tickets, giving customers a reliable acknowledgment before their order proceeds. - Option 2: Verbal Flow [POS-integrated partners]
Some restaurants’ POS systems cannot reliably surface in-app allergy requests. For these partners, the Uber Eats app prompts customers to call the restaurant directly whenever they select an allergy option. A one-tap entry point guides the customer to call the restaurant directly for verbal confirmation of their capability to accommodate allergies. This manual handoff ensures that restaurant partners receive and have an opportunity to accept allergy requests, despite system limitations.
Why this mattered for both safety and the business
We partnered with our product team to map the current user journey and identify critical risks and opportunities. Our research revealed challenges affecting both users and the business:
- The User Challenge: Customers with allergies faced significant barriers to safe food ordering. Many users avoided food delivery altogether due to safety concerns, while others developed elaborate workarounds like calling restaurants directly or only ordering from familiar places.
- The Business Impact:
- $30M in advertising revenue was at risk from regulatory compliance issues
- Potential partnerships lost due to liability concerns among merchants
- Increased support burden from dietary restriction-related incidents
- The Regulatory Reality:
- Growing regulatory scrutiny around allergen handling across multiple markets
- Legal team identified current system as requiring immediate improvement
- Need for compliant, auditable allergy communication processes
THE PROCESS
What we learned from speaking to users
We conducted interviews with eleven UK merchant teams and ran usability sessions with customers managing severe allergies. Three themes emerged:
- Merchants treat printed tickets as the order’s source of truth, so critical allergy information must appear on hard copies.
- Teams preferred a structured, centralized allergy request workflow over consulting multiple free-form fields.
- Stakeholders and restaurant partners feared misuse of allergy fields for customization requests, so they insisted on a mandatory acknowledgment step.
We also benchmarked competitors and overhauled our analytics infrastructure to persist allergen data for 90 days, enabling cross-functional reporting and direct integration with support tools.
Ideation & Design Process
We kicked off by creating a system diagram to identify opportunities for improvement in the current allergy flow. As a team, we evaluated the current flows to identify opportunities to improve the user experience, flag any safety concerns, and determine where we might need to employ UXR to learn more about merchants and customers.
I explored potential solutions with quick sketches to determine where allergy messaging best fits into the merchant and consumer flows. I used Figma to developed mid-fidelity wireframes to validate placement and interaction patterns. We then built three high-fidelity prototypes and ran rapid concept reviews with adjacent teams, legal, ads, and product teams to vet clarity and technical feasibility. Feedback drove two major decisions: displaying allergy data prominently on printed tickets and adding a one-tap acknowledgement step for both parties.
IMPACT & METRICS
28%+ adoption and measurable safety improvements
Based on our 30-day A/B test across seven UK cities, the new allergy feature system delivered significant improvements:
User Behavior Changes
- 28.6% adoption of structured allergy flows
- 6% reduction in special instruction usage for allergy requests (statistically significant)
- 12% reduction when excluding orders that used both methods
- 20% decrease in defect rates for orders with allergy requests
Conversion and safety
- 1%+ lift in session conversion for users with allergies compared to overall users
- Positive reduction in order completion among users with allergies (represent prevented unsafe interactions)
Business Impact
- $30M in advertising revenue protected from regulatory compliance risks
- $5M in new partnership opportunities unlocked through increased merchant confidence in allergy handling
- Recognition from Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) organization for our work advancing food safety standards
Stakeholder Response
Legal teams praised the improved allergy disclosure clarity on printed tickets, while operations partners reported fewer order-related issues and improved merchant satisfaction with the structured approach.
REFLECTION
What we learned about designing for life-critical interactions
The benefit of working within constraints
- Working within technical limitations (POS system constraints) actually led to a more inclusive solution than trying to force universal adoption of new technology.
Emotional design extends beyond aesthetics
- The visual design was deliberately understated. Considering the medical nature of allergy disclosures, we wanted to ensure users felt safe and supported.
Cross-functional collaboration at scale
- Managing alignment between legal, operations, engineering, and product teams required different communication strategies for each audience, such as technical specs for engineers, risk frameworks for legal, and operational impact for restaurant partners.
Future-Proofing Through Systematic Thinking
- By building flexible architecture from the start, we set the stage for future expansion to grocery delivery, international markets, and emerging restaurant technologies.
- In future phases, we could add multi-language support, conduct deeper accessibility audits for screen-reader users, and explore integrating allergy features for merchants using POS systems to make the preferred workflow for allergy features available to all restaurant partners.
The intersection of safety and UX
This project reinforced my belief that the best design solutions don’t just solve functional problems, they build trust between people. Every interaction we designed was an opportunity to demonstrate that we understood the stakes involved when someone with a severe allergy decides to trust us with their safety.
The nearly 30% adoption rate is more than a metric. It represented thousands of people who felt confident enough to share their allergy information with our platform. Designing for trust makes this possible.
Tools Used: Figma, UserTesting, DScout, Optimal Sort, Mural
Methodologies: User interviews, competitive analysis, A/B testing, accessibility auditing, stakeholder workshops