A UX Case Study on nummy — the foodie social network

Background: Nummy was released in early January.

The app is aimed at users who want to expand their social network over food.

It offers a dining experience at a restaurant allowing users to book a seat (rather than a table) and view other’s profiles of other nummy app users who are attending.

Currently, nummy has partnerships with 12 restaurants and Yiran herself currently solely creates and hosts the events.

The Brief

• Develop a new feature that allows users to create events and
• Improve aspects of the current UX

Yiran’s goal was to have more active users

OUR FIRST TASK: Improve the UX. We identified the onboarding process needed help

We ran some usability tests

• It was causing 80% of users wanting to abandon.
• User interviews concluded the problems were due to form design and mandatory information users were asked to provide.
• The average time taken to complete was 2 min 25 sec.

[5 usability tests]

The current design:

How we improved the design

We reduced the onboarding time from just under 2.5 minutes to approx. 20 seconds

• The design of the form for setting up the profile was causing users to spend a lot of time on it.
• By relocated the profile set up to allow users to complete at a time convenient to them and enables them to complete the onboarding process faster.
• We also redesigned the profile set-up to give the user more control over their information and speed up the usability.

The improved design:

OUR SECOND TASK: Design a new feature for users to create events

1. UNDERSTANDING THE USERS

We quickly identified two types of users and flows surrounding events

• users who browse & book events (guests)
• users who create & manage events (hosts)

We interviewed both.

Hosts

• Too much time on repetitive tasks. Users are re-enter the same information every time for wanting to host the same event in the future.
• Not being able to edit an event after it has been published to accommodate for changes such as the capacity or date.
• They events on multiple platforms and hence dealing with multiple lines of communication with guests.

Guests

• Like to know who else is / how many attending the events
• Want to see event information such a restaurant & food pictures, formality info, menu & dietary info — interestingly competitors weren’t accommodating to formality and dietary info.

From secondary research:
User’s abandon online forms when the design is too long, confusing language, the process is too complicated or if too much personal information is asked*.

Mirjam Seckler's research shows us that,

“When forms follow basic usability guidelines, the completion time significantly decreases and users are almost twice as likely to submit the form with no errors from the first try”.

2. DEFINING THE PROBLEM

We used the JTBD framework because our target audience was broad:

“When I want to host an event, I need to be able to create it easily & manage it efficiently all in one place so that they can spend less time organising it”

3. IDEATING & PROTOTYPING

Features we wanted to ideate on:

• The interaction between ‘guest mode’ and ‘host mode’ to clearly differentiate the two areas of the app
• The form’s usability design — the categorisation, structure and flow of questions of the form for creating an event — progressive disclosure
• Event admin (creating from new or saved or old, editing published events, duplicating events) — how to save time

Once we agreed on the ideas & designs, we started to put them together and think about how the user would move through it

Wireflow — the design on paper

We mapped out the user flow from entering the app on the home page right the way through to publishing their event.

With this basic flow we designed how other features (to be developed in next steps) would sit in relation to this.

We then tested out this first prototype

5. HOW DID THE DESIGN HOLD UP TO TESTS?

The design’s recurring problem: switching between ‘guest mode’ and ‘host mode’

• ‘Guest mode’: browse & book events
• ‘Host mode’: create & manage events

We designed various forms of buttons and interactions in order to make this as clear to the user as possible. It took a lot of iterations to get consistently right!

6.PROJECT SUMMARY

We reduced the onboarding time from approx. 2.5 minutes to approx 20 seconds.

We also developed a seamless feature for users to create and manage events.

To integrate this into the current design, we created a toggle feature within the header of the current app design to enable users to switch between two modes. One mode (guest mode) for browsing events and the other mode (host mode) for creating & managing events.

The final form design and flow of tasks for creating an event received positive user feedback.

They described the process as:

• “easy to use”
• “logical” and
• “very straight forward”.

​The client was very happy with our work and would look to implement our designs when she received further funding and resources.