Restaurant Diet Finder
About
I enjoyed going out with my friends to restaurants for lunch and trying out new cuisines. However, I would have one friend who would run into diet restrictions due to her health issues. I helped her out by exploring through different restaurants and menus in Yelp to see which dishes she would be able to eat. Eventually, this became a challenge. Some restaurants do not display the ingredients on the menu for each meal. Therefore, I had to discuss with the waiter what meals were suitable for her dietary restrictions. It inspired me to create a mobile app that catered towards people who faced a similar struggle as my friend for finding meals at a restaurant suitable for their diet needs.
Problem
People who are going through dietary restrictions face dilemmas in finding meals at restaurants that suit their needs. Currently, users would have to go through a tedious process of searching restaurants through Yelp or Google. They would have to explore the menus and ingredients of each dish. It was the best way to identify which ones are suitable for their dietary needs. When users have food restrictions, it would be complicated for them to hang out with their friends who have no food restrictions. How could there be a social experience for people with dietary restrictions?
Approach
The purpose of the project was to establish a project brief. It was for the client on the Restaurant Diet Finder app. As for the mobile app design, there were wireframes sketches and two versions of the prototypes. I also had to make changes in the way I approached specific areas of the app. There are two areas of exploration that were not currently in the prototype due to time constraints. The first area was providing beyond one dietary restriction. It would involve a tedious taxonomy analysis through a search to filter out restaurants that do not contain a combo of diets. The other important note to provide for the app was providing social network security within the Buddy Support. It was to ensure that secured profiles before meeting in person who does not have criminal backgrounds or hackers.
Results
Project Brief
The project brief described the research of Restaurant Diet Finder. It focused on identifying the user base, app competitors, and functionality. The target users were people with severe food restrictions due to health issues or allergies. The businesses were the restaurants that provided their meals for specific diet restrictions. The crucial functionality of the app focused on creating a user profile. The user profile allowed users to select a diet that would automate the search of restaurants containing the meals based on the chosen diet. The other areas were exploring the content awareness on educating users on the diets.
Competitors
HealthyDiningFinder provides users to search for nearby restaurants that provided healthy meals to buy. When a user clicks on a restaurant, it can see the list of healthy meals. It could be a useful idea for the Restaurant Diet Finder to provide the list of meals from each Restaurant based on each restrictive diet. Food Tripping, the GPS-based app, shows you great options close to you with a fun, simple interface that puts the good stuff at your fingertips. Food Tripping made it simple to find healthier and more thoughtful food while you’re on the road or at home looking for inspiration. The design layouts of Diet Buddy resembled the Bumble app for making friends. As for diet news, it was similar to the New York Times.
Wireframe Drawings
The goals of the wireframe project on Restaurant Diet Finder were to present a clear structure and the flow of how a new user goes through the app. I designed the layouts that ensured familiarity for the user to avoid the extra time going through the menu options. It would involve a journey of the user discovering the Restaurant Diet Finder app for the first time. I sketched out the wireframes and cut each one out to place them into a sequential hierarchy. Based on the feedback, I had to provide a scenario on user login. I also needed to show the process of the profile, especially on the diets. It was essential to provide content consistency.
Digital High-Fidelity Prototype
I took all of the peer feedback and made some adjustments for the High Fidelity prototype. The main updates made were providing the diet choices in the user profile for diet buddies and the restaurant finder.
Lessons Learned
I realized the excessive amount of time and effort it took to create a polished design and smooth interaction within the prototype. Sometimes, I had to go back to the drawing board when I faced problems with specific features like figuring out how people can connect through similar diets in Diet Buddies. It also took time to create solutions on content awareness on diet lifestyles through the Diet News. It is essential to know the limitations of the tool to consider before providing feedback to the user. I used Figma that provided simple interactions of the prototype. There are specific features that the user would wish to see. However, they were hard to implement on the prototype due to the tool restrictions. The most important part of the project is to be empathetic to the user. In other words, what it’s like to be in a user’s shoe. These are some of the ways to figure out how to improve the user’s experience.
