Priya's Delivery Quiz

Before the bikes leave, each delivery boy answers a few questions about today's dishes - what is in it, is it vegetarian, what it costs.

Who this is for

Priya Nambiar cooks for a cloud kitchen out of her ground-floor flat in Kaggadaspura, Bengaluru. Forty to sixty orders on a weekday, one helper at the stove, and two delivery boys, Santosh and Rafiq. The menu changes every morning depending on what came from the mandi. The moment this software lands is 5.50 pm, before the bikes leave, when Rafiq has not looked at the menu since breakfast and a customer in Doddanekkundi is about to ask him at the door whether the kofta has onion in it.

How the job is done today

Priya writes the day's menu on the back of an old bill, photographs it, and sends it to a WhatsApp group with three people in it. Santosh opens it. Rafiq does not. At 7.40 pm, with three kadhais going, her phone rings and it is Rafiq standing outside a gate asking whether the pulao is veg, and she cannot remember if she used the same masala as yesterday. Sometimes he guesses. Twice this month a customer sent food back. The prices are the other problem - she changed the thali to 180 rupees and Rafiq collected 160 for a week.

The screens, in order

1. Today's menu — Priya types the dishes she is cooking today, marks each one veg or non-veg, writes what is inside it and the price.
2. Who is riding — The delivery boy opens the same link and taps his own name, so nobody has to remember a password.
3. One question — Asks a single question about one dish with four big answers to tap, and tells him the right answer the moment he gets it wrong.
4. Ready to ride — Confirms he has finished and leaves the day's menu on his screen so he can glance at it standing outside a customer's gate.
5. Priya's check — Shows Priya only one thing - which of her boys has finished the questions today and which has not.

What it keeps track of

• Today's dishes — dish name, veg or non-veg, what is inside it, price, which day it was on the menu
• Delivery boys — name, nothing else
• Today's round — who answered, which day, which questions he got wrong, did he reach the end

The one decision that matters

Does Priya write the questions, or does the site make them from the menu she already typed. Writing her own questions gives her better ones - she knows that the Sunday biryani is the thing people ask about. But she has ninety seconds at ten in the morning with wet hands, and if the app asks her for questions she will stop using it by Thursday. Build the questions out of the menu itself. She types kofta, non-veg, onion garlic ginger and cashew, 180 rupees, and the site turns that into questions on its own. Her only job stays the job she was already doing - writing down what she is cooking.

What to leave out of the first version

No scores kept from one day to the next, no ranking of Santosh against Rafiq, no passwords, no photos of the dishes. The point is that both of them know the menu at 5.50 pm, not that Priya has a record of who is a better student. A score that follows a man around makes him hide a wrong answer instead of learning from it, and the first version is small enough that she can just look at her two boys and ask.

How you would know it worked

Rafiq is standing at a gate in Doddanekkundi, a customer asks whether the kofta has onion, and he answers straight away. Priya's phone does not ring once between seven and nine at night.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run a small cloud kitchen from my house and I want a website where every morning I type the day's dishes, whether each one is vegetarian, what is inside it and the price, and it turns that into a short quiz for my two delivery boys. They open the same link on their phones, tap their name, and answer five or six questions one at a time, four options each, big enough to tap with one thumb. If a boy gets one wrong it shows him the right answer and asks that one again at the end. When he finishes, the day's menu stays on his screen so he can check it at a customer's door. On my side I only want to see which of them has finished today. Everything must fit one phone screen with no scrolling anywhere, and it should clear itself each morning so I start fresh with the new menu.