Designers
Designers
Designers
GrubCircle
Turning food delivery into a shared, social decision-making experience
Key Words
Designers
Anika Morin
Lillian Darling-Beckman
Reem Alshoaibi
SUMMARY
GrubHub challenged us to make its app essential to student life. Through research, we found students face decision fatigue, budget anxiety, and rely heavily on peer recommendations. We developed GrubCircle, a social feature that lets users see, review, and reorder what their friends are eating. By transforming food ordering into a shared, trust-based experience, GrubCircle repositions GrubHub from a transactional tool into a daily social habit.
challenge
Our research revealed key gaps in the current food delivery experience: overwhelming choice, lack of trusted guidance, and high sensitivity to cost and time. Students often default to friends for recommendations, highlighting a disconnect between platform design and real behavior. The opportunity was to reduce friction in decision-making by embedding social trust directly into the app experience.
Outcome
The final solution, GrubCircle, is a social discovery layer within GrubHub, featuring a map and feed that showcase friends’ orders, reviews, and quick reorder options. This directly addresses decision fatigue by surfacing trusted choices, reduces time spent browsing, and aligns with students’ social habits. The result is a more engaging, intuitive experience that drives repeat use and long-term loyalty.
MEET THE Designers:
Anika Morin
Lillian Darling-Beckman
Reem Alshoaibi