A UX/UI Student Project
.png)
Design a food delivery app that improves the user experience by taking the frustration out of ordering through an app while also helping them decide where/what they want to eat.
9 Weeks -Fall 2020
UX, UI Designer & Researcher
Miro
Figma
Grant Daniel-Team Leader
Jennie King (Myself)
Alexus Patterson
Steven Chrisholm
Matthieu Daley
In the fall of 2020, I worked alongside 4 of my classmates to follow the Goal-Directed Design (GDD) process to create an application prototype, Foodie. The duration of the project was 9 weeks. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this project was performed fully remote. All meetings, discussions, and interviews were performed through Discord. Our initial idea was to create a food delivery application where couples or friends could more easily decide where they wanted to eat by using a swiping function similar to dating apps. Once they had their “match”, they would know where to eat. After completing user research and a competitive audit we were able to better pinpoint the gap in the market and our application became a space where users could use a swiping tool to discover what they wanted to eat themselves, build a community, and showcase “mom and pop” style restaurants that are often overshadowed by big chains.
Using Goal-Directed Design (GDD), designers seek to bridge the gap that currently exists in the digital product development process. This gap is between user research and design. By following a sequence of techniques in GDD, designers are able to include the user in the development process; therefore, creating a product that is more user-centered.
My team and I used the steps of the goal-directed design process to create a food delivery application prototype that was centered around the wants and needs of the user.
Our team conducted field research (observation and contextual interviews) to provide qualitative data about potential users' goals/behaviors regarding the product and service. This phase also includes kick-off meetings, lit reviews, competitive service audits, and interviews with stakeholders and subject matter experts.
Below is a link to our research report that outlines the research process and our results, as we move through the GDD process.
During the kickoff meeting, the design team is introduced to the project. Since this was a project for school, we did not have any actual clients. To make up for that, we were given special instructions to fill out a kick-off meeting worksheet to help us better picture a fictional client and their needs. Together, we agreed on a common understanding of the project purpose, timeline, organization, and the responsibilities of each team member.
The Literature Review is an essential part of the research process. This allowed us to identify gaps in the research, conflicts in previous studies, and open questions left from other research. We do this by examining the strength and weaknesses of existing research in the food and service industry.
During the research phase of this project, the team conducted an analysis of our direct competitors. These were other websites/apps that were similar to Foodie. Doing this helped us discover what is working and what isn't for other food services in the industry, so that we can make those strategies work for us and gain a competitive advantage
Market search helps us select and filter features within each app. However, many of these food service apps do not offer standard features that would be expected, such as filtering by price and rating. The rating function only allows users to go to third-party services, such as Yelp.
To gather more information about food service users, we observed and conducted interviews with a total of 4 college students who frequently use apps to have food delivered to them. Gathering insight from three women and one man allows us to collect data from multiple different perspectives.
As a team, we came up with a series of questions to ask during the interview, but left space to allow the conversation to flow naturally and ask additional questions to gain more information or clarity if the interview led us that way. These interviews provided us with great feedback on food service apps.
As user interviews and observations are performed, behavioral patterns begin to emerge. We can then categorize these to help us better understand how our users will interact with our application.
As shown in this picture, each team member made sticky notes on a Miro board of our key observations from each interview. We then looked for commonalities and grouped them together to show the behavioral trends amongst our potential users.
These maps help create a clear picture of users' patterns and suggest goals and motivation, which further in the design process will help us build our personas in the modeling phase.
After categorizing the data from our user interviews, we created a primary persona and a secondary persona. Personas allow us to recognize the user's needs and goals. These personas will also serve as the main character in a narrative-scenario-based approach later in the design process. This will help us create a design that is iterative and generates specific user based goals.
.png)
.png)
Before we created our requirements list, we created context scenarios from the point of view of our primary persona, Cassie. This is an effective strategy in GDD that helped us establish the context of the setting, potential disturbances, and the total interaction time. From these scenarios, we built a design requirements list that would assist us when building our prototype.
After examining and researching different key factors of food and service apps, we determined that most users are neither beginners nor experts, but tend to fall in the category of intermediate experience. As a designer, I have to be sensitive to user's goals and create a design that helps them achieve those goals.
Using the Goal-Directed Design process, I was able to successfully focus my attention on the users as well as the technicalities of the app itself. Through this, our app was more focused, personalized, and goal-directed for our users.
