Project Overview
Summary
For my first project at General Assembly, I was tasked with designing a food app for my user Julien. This
The Research Phase
User Interview
I began my process with an interview with Julien. I wanted to get to the route of his frustrations and began by identifying his current eating habits.
The main areas I wanted to focus on were:
- What were Julien’s cooking habits or lack thereof?
- What did he prioritise when it came to choosing food to eat?
- What were his spending habits?
From the interview I uncovered several important findings:
- Julien eats out twice a day. He doesn’t enjoy cooking and isn’t interested to learn.
- He prioritises convenience, low prices and would ideally like to be healthy.
- He always picks up his lunch and dinner because he doesn’t want to pay a premium for delivery.
- Once he has picked up his meal, he takes it back to the office or back to his flat to eat with his flatmate.
My interview with Julien helped to establish an ideal target market; young professionals who don’t like to cook, but are also concerned with the unhealthy and high cost alternative of eating out.
Experience Map
After the interview I was then able to create an experience map that included tracked Julien’s user journey and his emotional state throughout.
Defining The Problem
Having done my initial research, it became clear to me what the central point of my goal should be when taking this through to the design stage. I clarified this with a problem statement.
Problem Statement
Julien needs a way to order low cost healthy food to his home and work place because he doesn’t like to cook & wants to save money and be healthy.
Sketching Solutions
I started brainstorming by sketching up a few ideations and mapped out a storyboard.
In the above sketches we can see two ideas that I thought of to help Julien save time and money:
- One would be a service that allowed him to order and pick up food from places nearby work and on his way home.
- Another idea would be an app that delivers without having to pay extra for the delivery service.
I felt however, that these ideas weren’t the best way of solving the issue because Julien would still be spending a lot of money to get his food from local restaurants.
Instead I chose to go with an idea storyboarded below:
I decided that the best option for Julien would be a ready meal delivery service that could deliver multiple freezable meals to both his home & work address each week.
“I don’t have enough space in my freezer to keep a full weeks worth of meals for both lunch and dinner”
The function to set a weekly delivery time to both addresses was born out of information I found from speaking with Julien.
Thinking About Our Brand
In order to start defining Ready Meals identity I focused more closely on the brand, its values and its target audience. From my interview with Julien I knew I wanted the design to be a fun app for young professionals. I wrote an elevator pitch to develop that a bit further, and then started thinking about our values and our positioning in the market.
Elevator Pitch
For: busy young professionals
Who: need to eat healthily and cost effectively.
The product: allows users to order gourmet frozen meals for low costs
Meaning: they save time and money.
Unlike: eating at nearby restaurants or using fast food delivery services, which are often expensive and unhealthy!
Brand Values
- Fun
- Trustworthy
- Simple
- Affordable
- Enjoyable
Brand Personality
I used the ‘is, but is not’ model to develop our personality.
Ready Meal is:
- Affordable but not frugal
- Consistent but not boring
- Playful but not childish
Brand Position
In the below axis you can see where Ready Meals would like to position itself. Somewhere in the accessible & fun quadrant, similar to brands like Deliveroo and Just Eat.
Developing The Solution
Having looked more closely at our brand identity, I then went back to the drawing board to start developing a sketched prototype, that I would start iterating into a hi fidelity prototype.
I drew up a user flow to help develop the structure of the app, and then turned it into a wireflow, as seen below:
Once I had established the wireflow, I then made this into a clickable prototype in order to carry out some usability tests.
Usability Testing
Having created the clickable paper prototype on marvel, I then took it to users to see how they interacted with it.
For the context of the usability test I asked the users to:
- Imagine they were a returning customer
- Go through a simple process to order one spaghetti carbonara to their work address
Feedback
The process of usability testing was really insightful and helped me to identify a couple of key issues, detailed below:
- It was unclear to the user what to do on the address setting page. I changed the title of page ‘Home or Work’ and instead opted to use ‘Set Delivery’.
- I also added a downwards facing arrow to make the drop down menu more obvious to the user.
Visual Design
With a functioning flow, I then turned my focus to the visual design and picked up from the branding exercises. I began with a mood board:
This helped to identify the mood that I wanted users to associate the app with.
Style Guide
I decided on a colour palette and typography, the details of which can be seen in the below style guide:
High Fidelity Prototype
Conclusion
Overall, this project was a brilliant first step into the world of UX and conducting a full UX process. I learnt a great deal about asking the right questions in interviews to uncover users behaviour, feelings & pain points.
Conducting different branding exercises and focusing on visual design was a really rewarding process and I was pleased with the final result.
