TasteBuds!
July 2020 UX Conceptual Project Solo Project
Summary
TasteBuds! is an app that is focused on connecting people through their taste buds. Users can look at what their friends are eating, and search for restaurants based off their taste preferences.
Research
User Interviews/Survey
My research process is heavily influenced by Goal-Directed design. To start my research I focused on creating a survey and interviewing users. Gathering both qualitative and quantitative data will help me with the rest of the design process. The survey has 40 participants. Here are the some of the results from the survey that I had conducted:
Competitive Analysis
After looking at the results from my survey. I discovered that Yelp and Google are the most popular search platform for food. I then conducted a competitive analysis to see what were the strengths and weak points of the platforms.
Key findings:
Both Yelp and Google lack social and personalization features.
Both companies are focused on connecting businesses to customers, but misses out in connecting people.
Personas and Goals
From the survey and user interviews that I have conducted, I created two personas.
Nick Alberto
23, Medical Assistant
San Diego
“Eating with my friends is part of the experience”
About
Nick is a recent college graduate. When he isn’t play video games with his friends or hanging out with his girlfriend, he’s working long hours at work. To help relax from work, Nick loves going out to eat with his friends. Living in San Diego, Nick has a huge amount of restaurants to choose from. He often finds himself looking at reviews to find a place to eat, than actually eating and hanging with his friends.
Between looking at different reviews and different websites for information, Nick also finds himself messaging his friends for help.
Goals
Share and view restaurants with friends
Create a list of his favorite places to share with friend
More specific reviews the food
Find a better way searching for food
Frustrations
Finding a place to eat with friends
Discovering new restaurants
Finding food he likes
Nicole Tran
27, Social Media Editor
San Francisco
“I love recommending places to my friends”
About
Nicole is a social media editor living in San Francisco. She enjoys sharing and blogging about the food places shes been to. Her notes app is filled with different restaurants that she thinks are amazing. Since she lives in a busy city, she finds herself caught in busy wait times for certain places.
Since she is knowledgeable in social media, she knows that some reviews on other sites are fake. So she finds herself asking her friend group for recommendations.
Goals
Post photos of the places she has eaten at
View when restaurant is busy
See what her friends are eating
Frustrations
legitimacy of reviews
Identifying food from photos
Who is the MVP?
The MVP of the project is Nick Alberto. I will be focusing on him through the project.
User Stories
After Identify who is my MVP, I created User Stories. The User Stories can be found here user stories.
User Flow Chart
After creating the user stories, I focused on creating the User Flow Chart. This will help me understand how all the pages will connect throughout the app. You can find all the User Flow Charts here.
Wireframe
Here are some of the sketches I made.
Low-fi Designs
From my sketches, I created a low-fi wire frame of how the app would look and how it connects. You can find the low-fi designs here.
Style Guide
Before creating the High Res Screens. I created a style guide to help me keep organized during the High Res design phase.
High Res Screens
Creating the Taste Bud Preference!
This is one of the main features of the app. Users have the ability to create and edit their taste profiles. The taste profiles have a main group and sub group. The main group consist of the 5 most common taste profiles. Sub profiles are additional profiles that users can select to have a more refined search/recommendations. Users also have the ability to skip this step. The way that this would work is like following a hashtag. Following a taste profile would allow users to track taste profiles that they have created. This can also be edited in the setting tabs.
Conclusion
Just like any case study, the key is to focus on the user. I focused on creating the app to be heavily focused on the experience of the user. It was important to keep going back and get feedback from different people. Another thing that I learned is that every step of the process deserves great attention. With great research, it makes it easier to design. However, I learned that the end product is greatly as important as the process of making it. This case study went beyond my 3 week sprint, but I found it important to really focus to get the feedback and correct from it. All in all, TasteBuds! was a really fun case study that allowed me to focus on designing for a new idea. I learned a lot, and had a great time having a lot of freedom in the design stages. Currently learning how to code to hopefully make this into a real app!