Exploring a transparency-first service concept for UK delivery riders
A founder-led service design and product discovery project
Context
Jondas began as a response to my own experience working across multiple delivery platforms and struggling to understand earnings, targets, and decision-making trade-offs.
Rather than starting with a mobile app, the work focused on understanding the service ecosystem around on-demand delivery and identifying where transparency, insight, and coordination break down for riders.
This was an exploratory project, no live product, no development team, and no mandate to ship.
The Challenge
The challenge was not UI, it was service clarity.
Delivery riders operate within a fragmented, high-pressure service environment:
Earnings fluctuate by time, platform, and location
Riders often work across multiple apps simultaneously
Time spent waiting, navigating, or parking directly impacts income
Decision-making is fast, pressured, and poorly informed
Despite this, riders lack a single, reliable way to understand how they are performing and what actions will improve outcomes.
My Approach
I deliberately did not start with an app.
Given the complexity of the ecosystem and my own experience level at the time, I scoped the work as a service design and discovery exercise, focusing on understanding before solutionising
Ethnographic-style research and observation
Understanding riders’ daily workflows, motivations, frustrations, and earning behaviours
Role-based personas
Representing different rider contexts (part-time, full-time, professionalised) rather than generic “users”
Journey mapping across the delivery lifecycle
From awareness and order selection through collection, delivery, and post-shift reflection
Ecosystem mapping
Surfacing the relationships between riders, platforms, restaurants, data providers, and regulators
Service and business framing
Using value proposition and business model canvases to test whether the idea made sense as a system, not just a feature
Throughout the work, assumptions were made explicit and treated as hypotheses, not truths.
The Outcome
Instead of a mobile app, the outcome was clarity:
A clearly articulated problem space grounded in rider behaviour
A defined service concept centred on earnings transparency and decision support
Identified leverage points where intervention could improve rider outcomes
A realistic understanding of technical and operational complexity
Crucially, the work surfaced that jumping straight to a mobile app would have been premature without deeper validation and feasibility work.
©2026 Kenem White