YU CHENG CHANG
UX designer
Individual project
Problem
With a busy schedule of working and studying, more and more workers and students choose to eat out rather than cook by themselves. They are frustrated with the flavor, nutrient, and price of meals provided by restaurants, especially fast-food restaurants. With the consideration of health and the budget, homemade foods are still their favorite. Also, for students and migrants who left their home and traveled to the US, national cuisines are the panacea to motivate and cheer them.
In the U.S, lots of people are good at cooking and they are also willing to share their meal with people. Thus, how to connect the cooks who are happy to share with eager peoples and build up a fascinated experience of having meals are the major purposes of my design.
Design Process
PokeMeal
In order to understand end-users, meal searchers and providers, I designed a online questionnaire that collected:
(1)background information:
(2)Dining habit:
(3)Meal sharing or hunting experience:
Based on respondent’s dining habit, I directed them to answer different surveys, cook’s and searcher’s.
In cook’s questionnaire, I collected the reason of cooking, their sharing experience, and the used platforms/channels for communication.
In searcher’s questionnaire, I asked the the reason of eat-out, their consideration of purchasing foods, the factors of making decision.
Online questionnaire design
Study
In order to understand end-users, meal searchers and providers, I designed a online questionnaire that collected:
(1)background information:
(2)Dining habit:
(3)Meal sharing or hunting experience:
Based on respondent’s dining habit, I directed them to answer different surveys, cook’s and searcher’s.
In cook’s questionnaire, I collected the reason of cooking, their sharing experience, and the used platforms/channels for communication.
In searcher’s questionnaire, I asked the the reason of eat-out, their consideration of purchasing foods, the factors of making decision.
Online questionnaire design
Base on my research, an online questionnaire, 83% of home cooks (number of samples: 177) have shared and are willing to share their meal with people. And, 63.5% of respondents who select “eat-out” as their major dining behavior (number of samples: 74) mention that homemade foods are their favorites. And 52.6% of them mentioned that they have purchased and are willing to purchase homemade food from home cooks. They are busy office workers, international students, and migrants, and they are the people who are eager to have homemade meals. However, currently, these meal searchers need a platform to connect them with the people who love cooking and are enthusiastic about sharing their dishes.
In order to build the connection between meal searchers and meal providers, firstly, I need to know how do the meal searchers do when they are seeking their meal. Moreover, how should the cooks do for providing their dishes? Furthermore, I want to understand what are the key factors that influence meal searchers during the meal hunting. Also, what issues that home cooks have faced when they shared their meals.
Meal searcher:
According to the research, the top three reasons of eating out are:
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Want to try different meals/foods and restaurants.
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Save time
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Poor cooking skill
About the food, the searchers care about: delicious, food hygiene and freshness.
The top three key factors that influence the meal searchers and guide them to make the decision are:
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Reviews
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The beautiful pictures of meals
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The clear price
Home cooks:
According to the research, the top reasons of sharing food are:
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Feel confident about their cooking skill and what to share with other.
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Prepare too much food.
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Want to improve their cooking skill through people’s feedback.
Home cooks would like to provide meals that are:
(1)healthy food
(2)hygienic
(3)delicious
With the knowledge from observation and competitive analysis, I started the brainstorm and proposed several ideas for the meal sharing service. Sketching the ideas allow me to image the scenario and the interaction firstly, no matter how crazy the ideas are. I drew several key ideas on the paper, including ingredients sharing, zero food waste, the rest of food and individual’s homemade meal. With the feedback from course instructors and potential end-users, I narrowed down the ideas and focus on the concept, Pokenon Go.
In this idea, meal searching became a game that user has walk through the streets and discover the meals. This idea entertains users but loses the efficiency of finding a meal. After considering the feasibility and the entertainment, I decided to extract the pros from the ideas of Pokemon Go and integrate the features of the widely used app, to construct my app.
Brainstorming, sketching and storyboard
Based on the questionnaire and the observation from home cooks’ group, the three personas represent the target audiences of the meal sharing service.
Persona
Ideation
The story mapping is the good approaches for me to go through the whole service and list all potential touch points between the cook and meal searcher in my service. I included both the meal searcher and provider, and drew their daily timeline. Through the story mapping, I could have a complete flow of my users’ life and I could point out the potential opportunities that my application can intervene. In the store mapping, I discovered that the dining time is the perfect time for me to connect the meal searchers and cooks, especially in the time-limited concept. Meal searchers can obtain the food immediately just after cooks cooked it.
Story mapping
QOC and information architecture
The overall structure of my app was ambiguous at the beginning. I tried to clarify all the structure of functions that I should integrate into the system, including the functions for both meal searchers and cooks. I listed all the functions I want to add firstly. And, I classified similar functions together and built up the hierarchy. The result liked a tree diagram and it could help me to adjust the design.
With the Questions, Options, and Criteria (QOC) analysis, I listed all potential interaction for each major function and compared their pros and cons. Later, I structured the app.
I used the index cards to create the paper prototype and invited potential users to test my design. According to paper prototype testing, end-user could smoothly manipulate most of the interactions. The participants of paper prototype testing gave me a good feedback. However, they also raised the issues related to feedback, confusion of icons and wording, and the space for some additional information. Thus, I added the feedback, the whole item will change its background color, for the dining preference page. I also adjusted the words to distinguished the ordered meal and shared meal. Based on subject’s suggestion, I decided to have one more layer for delivering detail information of each meal. Although an additional layer might reduce the efficiency of manipulation, users still prefer to read more information before they order the meal rather than order that meal directly on the map view.
Paper Prototype
Prototype
