Dish Expo
Mobile UX/UI Design
Take a snapshot and bon appetit!
About the Project
DishExpo is a social platform for foodies to freely upload photos of their ordered dishes from the restaurant. By providing dish images, the users will easily find out their loved ones according to the first impression before getting into details - just like a quick date with the image.
Design Challenge
How to make high-quality images stand out from the feeds? What is the best controlling method to make sure all posts are related to food images?
Design Duration
Team
Individual Project
March 2020- April 2020 (6 Weeks)
Design Tools
Design Practices
User research
Wireframing
Rapid prototyping
User test
Visual Design
Interactive prototype
Sketch
Adobe Photoshop
Marvel
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Good-looking food always contributes to people's appetites.
Whenever you enter a restaurant, you may be immediately attracted by dishes from tables beside you. The first good impression towards a dish really makes you want to have a try.
Sometimes when you see your friend's post of fancy dishes on Instagram or Facebook, you might be eager to find out which restaurant is it from, or if there's anything recommended from the same restaurant. In return, you probably want to share the secret and yummy dish from the restaurant to your friends by taking a photo and offering a recommendation.
The main work flow is:
DESIGN RESEARCHES
Questionnaire & Analysis
The very first thing is to understand what information people normally get from food-related online platforms. In order to take a better advantage from the portable nature of mobile devices, I focused mostly on smartphone users, figuring out their use behaviors and points of need for food-related apps.
The questionnaire was delivered to 61 people via an online platform, interviewees are aged between 17 to 61, closely to equal in genders. Most of them are active smartphone users, which matched our survey targets.
Included Questions:
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How often do you check apps for food recommendations?
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What aspect do you care most before referring to the recommended restaurants/dishes?
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How often do you upload images/make recommendations for restaurants on apps?
Obviously, among all the users, most of them care much about the price and taste of the dishes, but nearly 4/5 of them never uploaded any posts on the food recommendation app, or simply never recommended dishes and restaurants on their daily social platforms. Half of them are restricted by the complicated steps of recommendation apps, like:
Sign up >> Verify >> Put in information >> Take photos >> Write text recommendation >> Rate stars >>...
Product Research
4 active user-driven products provided me with some inspirations. Instagram and Facebook are based on social connection, while Tripadvisor and Yelp are targeting features of recommendation, but with fewer connections between users.
DESIGN PROCESS
Ideation
From the primary search, I quickly generated 2 directions for the application. To attach food-related themes onto social platforms and highlight them. The daft chart on the right shows the idea generation, which gradually led to the project concept.
Obviously, solving the posting difficulties and increasing people's willingness to recommending the dish is the very first step.
User Targeting
Service Flow
Wireframes
Prototypes and User tests
Based on the wireframe, I created the whole set of paper prototypes and organized 2 rounds of user tests. The target is to test out if the user could quickly figure out the fastest way to create posts.
Without introducing the app functions to them, I offered them great freedom to explore the interface and observed their reactions and interactions with different buttons, interfaces, and features. The feedbacks turned out to be truthful, making me able to refine the design with a second chance.
Main updates after user tests:
DESIGN DELIVERABLES
Mood Board
Visual Identity & Assets Creation
I selected a warm and bright red color set to create a glowing atmosphere, and incorporate it with the contracted icons, making the visual style to be clean and attractive.
Main Features
Other Interfaces
Use Case Mockups
REFLECTION
This app is a combination of two kinds of popular functional products - social platform and guiding app. Based on my own interests and a concrete set of user studies, I found out the users' most concerns of a new product should be designed with a perfect time-control and visual attraction. As for a food-themed app, the visual attraction is the basis of the product and the secret to standing out, but other than managing the interface design only, I aimed to control the quality of the user's posts, to build it up as a user-driven food community.
The launch of the product is not easy, because it is data-driven with real-time user interactions, requiring plenty of development efforts. So up to now, the design stopped at the step of concept and prototypes. But it indeed provided another way to understand users, and inspired people with a new method to activate their appetite through social platform.
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