Responsibilities

UI Design
User Research
Usability Testing

Tools

Figma
Adobe Photoshop
Google Surveys
UserTesting

Timeline

Twelve Week Sprint
Six weeks - UX
Six weeks - UI

Introduction

Eat Easy!

Eazy Eats is a mobile app meant to replace paper menus and ease the decision-making process for diners that may be new to ethnic foods.
These interactive menus leverage pictures, videos, and augmented reality to provide diners with details crucial to the decision-making process including in-depth descriptions of the dish and its ingredients.
Design process

Five Stage Iterative Process

Challenge

1. How might we elevate the dining experience and help customers in the decision-making while ordering food at ethnic food restaurants?

2. How will this solution affect the business?

Help increase restaurant staff efficiency

With some restaurants running short on budget for the staff, a tool that can automate food ordering processing can cut on the restaurant staff and servers could give allocate more time with serving the dishes, managing the tables and customers.

Provide customers with the ability to find information themselves

With hundreds of tables to serve and cook for every day, servers are normally in a hurry to serve the orders and not in for long conversations. By providing detailed information about the food dishes in the hands of customers they can read through the information and make an informed decision thus creating a win-win situation for both audiences.
goal
After having numerous discussions and some out of the world ideas, our team decided to narrow it down into 3 main goals

Goal 1

A simple and an interactive food ordering experience

Goal 2

Resolve issues of customer while dining at a restaurant

Goal 3

Ease the decision-making process of ordering food
Research

Learning more about our users...

User Interviews

To empathize with users and to understand users' motivations and challenges, I conducted user interviews with three managers at Thai food restaurants and twelve people who frequently dine in at Thai, Indian and Mexican restaurants.

Surveys

I also crafted a survey to understand user challenges while ordering food at ethnic restaurants. To identify our target audience the surveys were distributed among people who frequently dine in at ethnic food restaurants with no age constraints. In the end, we received a total of 74 survey responses.

Target Audience

From the survey we garnered that, our target audience were people who -
  • are 18 years or older
  • who frequently dine-in at ethnic food restaurants are concerned about food ingredients and nutritional values in the food they are served and
  • have access to smartphones
Key Research Insights
After analyzing the interview and survey findings we found that the following factors contributed to a less enjoyable experience at restaurants serving ethnic foods:

Confusions with the food quantity or size

Meals usually do not meet the user’s expectations in terms of quantity or size. Many of the participants were confused about the quantity of food dishes.

Not sure what to order

60.8% of the participants didn’t always know what to order in a restaurant serving ethnic cuisine.

Unfamiliar food items

Participants had trouble understanding culturally labeled names and foreign ingredients used in the food items. 78.4% of the people asked for more clarification about the ingredients at the ethnic food restaurants.

Unsatisfactory responses from servers

When customers inquired about the foreign food items or ingredients, diners received unsatisfactory response.
users

User Personas

Storyboard

To understand the emotional perspective of the users, I designed this storyboard which shows a comparison between two users, one using a traditional paper-based menu and another user using the Eazy Eats app to order food at a restaurant.

Sitemap

Based on the ideal path user would take to navigate through the app, I created this sitemap to plan how the screens would flow with the app.
Design Solution

Style Guide

In order to implement a consistent visual language, I crafted a style guide to help myself and my fellow designer to generate consistent and structured designs for the app. The style guide included guidelines for typography, color, grids and components.

Scribbles to Prototypes

Starting with some rough sketches during our brainstorming session, I first created low fidelity mockups and obtaining feedback from the team I designed this high-fidelity mockups in Figma.
Testing solution in the wild

Heuristic Evaluation & User Testing

As a team of four people, each individual conducted Heuristic Evaluations based on "10 principles of interaction design by Jakob Nielsen". We identified common design flaws and discussed our results as a team to redesign the app.
I also conducted user testing tests during which participants were asked to perform task-based tests like:
  • Ordering food using the app
  • Visualize the AR model of the food item
  • Learning about ingredients used in the making of the food item
Finding #1
No option to navigate back to a previous screen
Finding #2
The ability to remove items from the checkout cart was missing
Finding #3
No feedback from the system when users performed certain actions
Finding #4
The navigation bar lacked labels that helped clarify the user's location in the app
key features

Food Description & Ingredients

Find detailed description of food dishes and option to modify ingredients

Augmented Reality Feature

Visualize food dishes to get better idea about size or quantity of food before it arrives at the table

Photos & Videos

View pictures or videos of food dishes served at the restaurant

Review & Place Order

Review and customize order before it’s placed
Impact

Learning Takeaways

Working on this project helped me as a designer to understand the importance of research and how designs can be guided with informed research and a user-centered approach. This are the few things I learned:
  • It's important to balance both the business needs and the user's needs. The goals of a business are very different from the user and there may be an incentive to cater to business needs more than user needs.
  • Fewer steps between Point A and Point Z may seem like the ideal solution, but sometimes, more steps are necessary to ensure that users have the proper context they need to make an informed decision.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel and use common design patterns and principles which are proven successful.

Next Steps

As I continue to work on this project for the next steps, I would like to:
  • Test the solution with the real audience by partnering with a few restaurants that are ready to adopt automated food ordering process. This will help to understand the feasibility of this solution and improve the app.
  • Design and add new features like ordering for large groups and payment options to pay directly from the app so that users have the freedom to choose their payment methods from a variety of options like Zelle, Google Pay or pay by cash.
  • With different restaurants and different food menus, it will be a challenging task to implement large data of food dishes with the app. I would like to brainstorm ideas to tackle this challenge.
  • Further improve the 3-D models of food dishes in the AR feature, by resembling it with the real food dishes so that users have a better idea about the size and quantity of the food.

Feedback on the design? Want to chat over coffee more about this experience? Feel free to shoot me a message or schedule a talk.

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© 2021-22 Designed by Dhaivat Shah
Style Guide