CHALLENGE
"Create a mobile application for foodies to find new buddies to go on food ventures with."
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How might we help people connect with the right foodies?
How might we make support the end-to-end journey of food trips with strangers?
ROLE
UX Research & Designer
(Start-up Food & Beverage / Tourism)
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Persona (Miro)
Competitive Review (Eventbrite, Viator)
Low & High Fidelity Designs (Figma)
UI Style Guide / Design System
Context: Understanding the Problem
OurFoodChapter is reinventing a social network where foodies - individuals with a keen interest in food - can find buddies for their next food venture. I was tasked to build up a mobile application across the customer journey flow, with a base style guide of 3 brand colours and 1 typeface.
User Persona
Designing to connect the right people
Initial thoughts about creating a community came about and starting innovating better and better ideas
(a) Social Media Platform - befriend, message, share news
(b) Tour Agency - connect individuals based on planned activities for passive consumers
(c) BOTH - connect with individuals on self-sourced activities, with the resources to support your trip!
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Among searching for users, and the creation of self-proposed activities, it was important to incorporate a "create your own group" feature, activity recommendations, and a budgeting app to consolidate group spending amongst strangers or acquainted friends. The logic was to keep everything on one platform while ensuring each individual's safety.
Wireframes of Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
First Iteration
A Design Thinking Approach: Uncovering assumptions
Double diamond approach: discover, define, develop & design
The Chicken & the Egg
We found that with more rounds of iteration and user testing, people wanted less, an activity to explore, and more of a platform to connect with others while using an activity as an excuse to meet one another!
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From here, we decided to give users more control and autonomy over self-proposed activities, and instead, focus on providing a platform which ensures user safety, opportunities to connect, inspirations for activities, and all the things they need to get started - like a budget tracker!​
Low fidelity screens
Revisisions
Future Plans
Designing for Inspiration
In future, I would venture building upon the need to inspire users. A channel for "Inspiration" could be introduced to keep users up to date with the recent trends, events, and hot topics to explore together. It would work to:
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Provide inspiration
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Immediate match between buddies based on interest
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360 support for meetups / seamless experience
Snapshot of Paylah e-gifting and high-fidelity design of Pick&GO e-gifting customisations
In terms of feasibility, we could seek support from search engine links from Pinterest, Google and Lemon8 in sourcing for upcoming events as well as trending topics.