10 weeks
Mainly be in charge of the user flow and user interface design. Help with user research in team of 7.
Most ethnic restaurants in town did not offer a wholesome authentic food experience. However, there is an increasing need to introduce better cultural and diverse experiences. Exploring this need and problem space lead us to come up with the idea of WeEat, a service that provides a cultural and authentic dining experience by connecting home chefs to people.
Provide unprecedented cultural experiences by connecting food lovers to local chefs that specialize in curating authentic cuisines in Greater Seattle Area.
Explore and understand whether authentic food service, that connects food lovers and local chef, can win in the marketplaces. We also want to learn the demands from the food lover and home chef, so that we can better design the service for our target audience.
We began by looking at what is currently in the market, and discovered that most competitors were globalized to focus either on a curated fine dining experience, or offered affordable meals to those wanting a more authentic experience while traveling.
BonAppetour allows users to book a personal experience with the host; however, it might cause a safety concerns since it might be a one-on-one experience for both of the home chef and food lover. In addition, the interface is with mostly text explanations and lack of pictures.
EatWith is a global platform with a better visual. Users need to register with the host and dine in other registers. However, eatWith is targeting the world market with most home chefs in Europe, which doesn't match with our target users.
Yumso was a Seattle based mobile application targeted the Chinese market. However, it focused solely on delivery and not a dine-in experience.
We have conducted that To further validate the need for our service, we conducted agile-based user interviews and distributed preliminary surveys.
For Food lovers, they are having a hard time finding authentic cuisines and a lot of authentic restaurants in town are either way too expensive or doesn't not provide an authentic experience. They wish to enjoy "more authentic foods than restaurants and cheaper prices."
They do have safety concerns in terms of visiting a stranger's places by themselves; however, they will feel more comfortable and secure if there are more participants in the events.
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For home chef, they enjoyed cooking and they would like to cook for others since:
Home chefs are also having the safety concerns. However, their concerns are highly rely on the trust and reputation system. They are more comfortable to host high-rate visitors and they also want to make sure that the application system offer help in terms of security.
We have conducted usability tests and redesign our product in order to reach our final design above. Here are some key findings that we have:
Aside from functional errors with the prototype, the general consensus by our users was that the app currently felt like other restaurant finding apps on the market. Our users expected many of the same functionality that other well known apps (like Yelp) provided. None of our users picked up on the fact that these were events created by individual home chefs. We decided to provide an instruction section for our first time users.
We have found that users had difficulty understanding the navigation bar functionality and unsure of where to go to complete certain tasks. Another thing we learned was that users had difficulty understanding the reservation page and that they were overwhelmed with the amount of information they were presented with. We also realized that our terminology was unclear and participants had a hard time distinguishing an “event” from a “place”. Through usability testing, we were able to find other small things that were unclear to the users, such as the party size of the reservations and various extra features that users did not find necessary in the application.
Multiple iterations of usability testing reminded our group of the importance of validating the need for a product with potential users. It was extremely helpful to work closely with users each sprint and adjusting designs based off the feedback we received. Our team also learned the values of working in a large group setting. Aside from delegating responsibilities to each member to ensure everyone’s participation, we also had to be understanding of each other’s differences of opinion in design. Achieving the perfect balance between incorporating good ideas while tactfully declining those that didn’t quite work out, allowed us to create a final product that feels consistent and complete.
