This makes no sense.

Hussaina Wardhawala
Nov 6 · 5 min read

Get ready to make sense out of it.

In light of ‘No-nonsense November’

I have been practicing the art of whiteboarding to come up with design solutions for problems that I find on reddit/medium/google but I decided to . check out Designercize.

Designercize generates random design challenges whose difficulty and time are at your liberty. So, I decided to generate me a rando-challenge.

Design: A settings view
For: A professional networking site
To Help: Foodies

It made no sense. Why would a foodie go to a professional networking site to check their settings view rather than binge on pasta while watching Chef’s table on Netflix?

So, I decided to do the challenge and find out.

Following a similar process as my previous article, I sketched a User Quadrant to give the problem more context.

The infamous ‘User Quadrant’

Soon, in the quadrant, I realized that even if the solution didn’t make sense, it would be my opportunity to improvise. And, improvise I did.

The primary needs of the Foodie are to connect with like-minded foodies in the city, in a professional capacity. We move to new cities every so often these days for new jobs, new life style and so on; and our primal human instincts still seek a connection. If you’re anything like me, you want to leave work at work and get a fresh breather at lunch, but also speak to someone new, someone not related to your field. What do you do? How do you find someone in the new city? Well, the solution is Foodish; a professional networking site that allows foodies to connect with people over an actual, physical meal (except it’s not a date, or could be — we not judgin’).

Me: It’s starting to make sense — err, is it?
Also, Me: Yeah, the settings page is where the Foodie user sets preferences for the food cuisine they’d like to eat/explore in the new city and based on that, they find a match (or more) who they can connect with and go for any meal.

🤯

To maintain a professional experience, we would allow the user to be matched based on their food preference and not explicitly search for another user, as they can do this on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and so on.

Getting to know Timothy and their behavior

Fun stuff — Persona (look at the image for more details):

35-year old, Timothy, wants to make new friends, is new to the city and loves Pasta.

User Journey (current flow)

Here I have assumed that Timothy connects with people on Facebook, and also uses it to keep track of their food “meetings” which inherently isn’t the goal of someone using Facebook. The gaps in the current flow also emerge due to the person being in a different city or being into a different cuisine.

User Journey (suggested flow)

Foodish Settings flow

The goal of the suggested experience is for the user, Timothy, to leverage the networking site - Foodish’s preference matching algorithm to rest assured that their match will have almost the same needs and goals.

Since the user, Timothy, can also choose their meal, city, date and time in the settings, they only get the best possible match!

As soon as the connection accepts the invite, they can connect and “schedule” a meal ;)

Wireframes

Lo-fi wireframes — only crucial to the new experience

I looked at the clock and I was nearing the end, so I decided to focus on 2–3 sketches rather than the entirety of Settings.

In the first one, the user sets their preference of cuisine, meal (breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack) as well as their location details. Then they wait for the algorithm to find them a human.

I went into some detail in the next step, once Timothy is matched with a user. They can see their profile and read any reviews written by this connection or find another match. This was essential, in my opinion, because I believe it would be highly unlikely that someone went out for a meal (1 hour long at.the.least) based on their name, city and food choice!

In the last steps, I took some time to design a calendar with date, time and invitation button. Once accepted, they would be able to see each other’s phone numbers, if they wanted to take this offline.

Development Roadmap

A developer’s saviour.

Owing to a background in computer science — I can understand how development tasks should be chunked out. In this case, they would be:

  1. Devise an algorithm for matching based on certain criteria and test it over and over.
  2. Integrate Google calendar’s invitation API.
  3. Gather data on the food joints in the city and provide them as suggestions to the users.

If this still does not make sense, picture yourself in front of a team of 5 people trying to interview you while you run them creative juices up and down to crank out a solution SO BEAUTIFUL, they want to hire every bit of the designer that you are ;)

Hussaina Wardhawala

Written by

Life happened. Coffee helped. Sipped on water, tripped on skies.

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