Saudi Arabia is experiencing a major digital boom. Numerous new businesses, including several food delivery apps from international giants with substantial budgets, have emerged suddenly. How can Hungerstation, the first food delivery app in Saudi Arabia, maintain and strengthen its position as the leading and most innovative food delivery service in town?

Let the Subconscious mind do the ordering. For the first time ever, a food delivery service introduces a new and smart feature that allows users to order food online by harnessing the power of their subconscious mind.

On average, an adult spends approximately 132 hours a year looking at mind-numbing menus online before deciding what to eat, frequently resulting in the wrong call. Psychologists refer to it as “Choice Overload”. A state when the brain is faced with an overwhelming number of options and struggles to make a decision, often ending up making the wrong call.

A study by Dr. Bruce Lipton revealed that the conscious mind can only process 40 bits of information per second, while the subconscious mind processes information at a rate of up to 500,000 times faster. This prompted the idea of helping people connect better with their subconscious mind to find the answers they seek.

On average, an adult spends approximately 132 hours a year looking at menus online before deciding what to eat, frequently resulting in the wrong call. Psychologists refer to it as “Choice Overload”. Hungerstation’s biggest enemy was indecisiveness, which often leads to rage-quitting the app altogether.

Our solution required us to collect data seamlessly, without requiring additional cognitive load that would exacerbate the indecision. Using an innovative application of eye tracking on a phone, we gamifed the data collection in a way that was engaging without being intrusive. Each millisecond of an eye gaze on a food image was translated into an attention measurement we called the “lookie” and used to determine which images to display next as we narrowed down the exhaustive field of food choices. As we collected lookies, our system became increasingly certain of what the user wanted. Often more certain than the user themselves.

A new feature on the HungerStation app recognizes when users have been endlessly scrolling and launches the subconscious ordering tool. The tool displays a variety of mouth-watering cuisines in real-time as the camera meticulously tracks the user's eye interest, using advanced algorithms and the front-facing camera. To enable effective eye tracking on a small mobile phone screen, Pupil Center Corneal Reflection was employed to seamlessly track a user's gaze and measure gaze duration and location for each dish.

The smart AI then uses proprietary Food Topic Modelling to narrow down the options and present a data report of what the user's eye concentrated on the most or what their subconscious mind is craving. This provides the user with a list of relevant restaurants to order from, seamlessly connected to the app for easy ordering. Additionally, the team collected and scored cravings by geography, validating the user’s cravings.

The tool was designed to adhere to HungerStation's brand identity, incorporating their colors, typeface, and graphic styles. A gamified approach was taken to make the tool fun, entertaining and easy to use. The interface was kept simple and playful to ensure that users would enjoy using it.

The choice of food photography was a crucial element too. The team behind the tool understood that selecting the right images would be vital in how users perceived it. As a result, they were meticulous in selecting images that were consistently mouth-watering, guaranteeing that users would receive accurate results.

In fact, HungerStation went beyond just the app and even replicated the experience on social media, allowing every person in Saudi Arabia to harness the power of their subconscious when it comes to ordering food. The experience also demonstrates "compressed commerce" in action, offering a fast and seamless way for users to satisfy their cravings.

Soon after its launch, subconscious ordering became a thing, leaving us with a banquet of new data for more accurate and personal targeting in the future. By helping Saudis awaken their subconscious mind to ordering the food they love, we gained a cosy corner in their conscious mind for years to come.

In 2 weeks:

2.5M impressions

630K portal visits

78K new customers

6K new customers per day