Foodi

Mobile app concept created for General Assembly's UX Design Course final project

Foodi was a passion project inspired by my love for food and the endless pursuit of memorable culinary experiences. I was responsible for all design phases, from initial inspiration through delivery.

Prototypes were created in Figma and tested for usability in Figma & Maze.

1

DISCOVER

2

DEFINE

3

IDEATE

4

PROTOTYPE

5

REFLECTION

DISCOVER

Inspired by my love for food and the endless pursuit of memorable culinary experiences, I sought to design an insider’s guide to eating in unfamiliar cities.

There are endless channels for researching restaurants in any given city, I wondered how I could design a solution to help users filter through the noise.

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User Interview Objectives

  • Discover which sources users trust for restaurant recommendations
  • Understand the benefits and limitations of their current methods

DEFINE

Insights

  • People who consider themselves foodies often already have a trusted close personal network as well as highly regarded industry figures and publications that they follow for restaurant recommendations.
  • Although they took pride in being knowledgeable about all things culinary, they rarely shared this knowledge in the form of online reviews unless they had a particularly bad experience.
  • Foodies were excited about building their own databases of loved culinary experiences and sharing them with people in their personal network.

Synthesized findings from user interviews and affinity mapping uncovered a lack of trust in crowdsourced review platforms. I decided to focus on a more social solution that would allow users to share knowledge within their network of personal friends, family, and colleagues as well as source recommendations from favorite influencers or industry publications.

"Travelers need a place to contribute to and source trusted knowledge of an area’s food because the ocean of information on crowdsourced review sites is overwhelming, non-inclusive, and can miss the mark on authenticity."

IDEATE

‍"How might we connect travelers and foodies with trusted friends, locals and industry experts for insight into a city's food culture?"

Initial sketches laid out a range of features aimed at providing solutions for the “How Might We” statement. These features were then prioritized using a 2x2 matrix based on impact and effort or expense.

Creating and sharing City Lists were identified as MVPs.

PROTOTYPE

Initial low-fidelity wireframes were created in Figma and had two flows for usability testing:
  1. Share a city list
  2. Add a “shared plate” to a user’s existing list.

Usability Testing Results

  • Users found the “add to list” and “share” icons to be intuitive.
  • Users were confused by the naming convention for “shared plates”
  • None of the testers chose the happy path of navigating to either of the lists through the profile menu.

Solution

  • Rename "shared plates" to more familiar vernacular - just “shared”
  • Remove the profile menu page altogether, making the search bar more prominent
  • Make “Shared” and “Your lists” links more accessible in the fixed lower menu
  • Add onboarding flow to make user experience more personalized

Visual Design

  • I created a mood board to capture bright colors and stark contrast inspired by Hong Kong's famous neon lights 
  • Opportunities for improvement in this initial design were identified through peer critique.

Usability Testing Round 2

‍Mission 1: Share Barcelona list with your coworker via text message
Insights:
  • Incident Severity Level: Minor
  • The testers' biggest challenge was trying to share from within the city list itself instead of just clicking the share icon in the main directory of lists.
Solution for iteration: 
  • Add a share button inside the city list to make accessible from multiple touch points.
Mission 2: Add a restaurant from a shared list to your existing San Francisco List
Insights:
  • Incident Severity Level: Serious
  • Navigating to shared lists icon in the main bottom menu bar was not intuitive. Testers wanted to find the shared restaurant via the search function.

Solution for iteration: 

  • Share only to other apps (messenger, email, etc.) eliminating need for in-app shared list

Final Prototype

VIEW PROTOTYPE

REFLECTION

This was my first comprehensive introduction to the design process. I went into General Assembly's UX Design Course with the assumption that I would be most drawn to the visual UI design aspect. As I began the process and started talking to users, I was surprised by how excited I was by the research phase. I really enjoyed organizing and re-organizing the data to reveal themes and common threads between user experiences. The process of being able to utilize information from conversations to uncover trends in the problem space really interested me and made me curious about diving deeper into UX Research methods.

I worked full time while taking this class so making time for classes and my project after work hours was challenging, but well worth it. This course provided an incredible opportunity to gain experience in research, prototyping, testing, getting and giving feedback, iterating and finally, presenting. My interest in UX was validated and I gained a real understanding of the design process.

Get in touch

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like to learn more about me or if you're interested in working together. Shoot me an email at annaleightc@gmail.com

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