Timeline
January-April (12 weeks)
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
My Role
Ideation, User Research,
UI Design, Prototyping
Contributors
Hanna Burnham, Maryam Faizur Rehman, Gabriel Paragas, Zhuan Wang
The Problem
For many, going out to eat with friends or family and picking a restaurant can be a challenging and time consuming experience. Factors like dietary needs/preferences, location, pricing, atmosphere, and more are often important to consider in the decision making process. Young adults, however, are often too indecisive or have specific wants and needs when it comes to their restaurant going experience and need the process of sending recommendations, choosing a restaurant, and making reservations to be quicker and more convenient.
How can the processes of decision-making and communication involved in the restaurant-going experience be made more convenient and efficient for young adults?
The Solution
Social Eats — An all-in-one mobile platform designed to simplify the restaurant-going experience for customers by combing the process of restaurant selection and booking with the power of social media.
Browse & Filter Restaurants
Browse through restaurants and narrow down your search results based on your price range, cuisine type, dining experience, distance, ratings, and a range of dietary needs and preferences.
View Restaurant Profiles
Select a restaurant profile and get an overview of the restaurant experience, find contact information, view their menu, verified customer reviews, and scroll through photos posted to the social tab.
Plan with Friends
Use the group feature to chat with friends, send each other restaurant recommendations to vote on, and plan your next food trip together directly in the app.
Book Reservations
Conveniently book reservations for you or your friend group and receive a QR code for a smooth arrival to your reservation.
01/ Competitor Analysis
Our research began with an analysis of our competitors to better understand the existing products and services on the market and identify what could be improved on and the gaps that our product could potentially fill.
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02/ User Research
To better understand our users, our team conducted a total of 6, 30-minute user interviews, focusing on young adults as our target audience. We gathered participants in their early 20s with varying lifestyles and financial, cultural, and religious backgrounds and asked them a range of questions centering around their restaurant-going experiences. In doing so, we identified several key insights in regards to their goals, needs, wants and pain points:
Decision-Making Process
People are indecisive and require time when choosing a restaurant, especially when deciding with others and factoring in their needs.
Convenience
People want convenience and efficiency; ways to narrow down their options and quickly access information about them.
Location/Distance
Travel time is a major factor in restaurant selection. People usually prefer not to travel far.
Dietary Restrictions
Finding a restaurant that is able to accommodate for dietary needs and preferences is essential.
Reviews
Reviews help to provide insight and play an important role in the decision-making process
Wait Times
Unexpected wait times can be frustrating and people would like to know what to expect ahead of time.
Aesthetics/Atmosphere
A restaurant's look and atmosphere can play a factor in the decision-making process for some people depending on the occasion and purpose of their outing
03/ Personas
From our primary user research, we developed two personas including a Muslim mother with strict dietary restrictions and a young athlete on a student budget to further empathize with our potential users.
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04/ Customer Journey
A customer journey map outlining the steps and challenges of going out to eat with friends.
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05/ Information Architecture
Based on our research findings, personas, and journey map, our team decided on the app's key functions and mapped out the hierarchy through an information architecture diagram.
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06/ User Flow
Working within a limited time frame and our project constraints, our team focused on one key user flow of sending a restaurant recommendation to friends and booking a reservation.
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07/ Wireframes
A preview of our visual design process involving many iterations of sketches and wireframes. Adjustments were made throughout the process based on results from user testing conducted by the team to identify both the successes and major paint points/challenges regarding the usability and functionality of our app.
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Final Takeaways
Being my first experience with conducting user interviews, this project provided me with valuable insights into the UX research procesas well as the process of iteration and trial and error involved in human-centered design. This project also allowed me to gain more experience working within a team and learn how to use our individual strengths in order to collaborate more effectively and efficiently.
Looking back, what would I do differently?
If I had more time to work on this project, I would have loved to further develop our search filters function to automatically filter results based on the user's profile and give the option to filter based on their friend's profile's as well. To take this project to the next level, I would also want to establish a more comprehensive design system and take time in developing a modular and dynamic brand identity.
