PROJECT OVERVIEW
The Product: Cee's Family Restaurant is a small, family-owned restaurant located in a small city. The restaurant aims to provide healthy, affordable meals and side dishes, offering competitive pricing. Cee's targets customers such as commuters and workers who may not have the time or ability to prepare a family dinner.
Project Duration: July 2023 - November 2023.
Challenge: Design an app for a local Family Restaurant that allows users to easily order healthy and affordable meals.
Solution: Cee's Family Restaurant offers busy customers, such as commuters and workers, a convenient way to place and receive orders without sacrificing quality.
Target Audience: Adults who are too busy to cook but enjoy the convenience of ordering food online.
Key Challenges/Constraints: Design a mobile app for a local family restaurant. User interviews and usability studies needed to be conducted virtually, and the project had no budget.
My Role: UX designer designing an app for Cee's Restaurant from conception to delivery.
Responsibilities: Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping in Figma, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
THE PROCESS
User Research
I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the needs of the users for whom I was designing. Through this research, I identified a primary user group as working adults who don't have enough time to cook meals. User research revealed that time was not the only constraint preventing users from cooking homemade meals. Other issues that users faced included their obligations, interests, or challenges that made it difficult to buy groceries for cooking or go to restaurants in person. I also wanted to understand the specific challenges that users might face in the scheduling and ordering process, so I incorporated this into my research.
In addition, I was able to identify three pain points that these users experience:
1. Time: Many working adults struggle to balance their professional commitments, personal lives, and other activities.
2. Stress: Cooking can feel overwhelming, especially when others are involved. Having to follow instructions and then clean up can take a lot of energy and be quite stressful.
3. Unappetizing: Despite meticulously following a recipe or putting effort into cooking a meal, the end result doesn't always match the delicious flavors and textures of a restaurant-prepared dish.
I used the information collected during interviews to create two personas, focusing on one named Avery. Avery is a mid-career professional with a busy schedule who wants to maintain a healthy yet delicious diet. Additionally, I developed a user journey map for Avery, which helped me identify that including a "previous orders" option would be beneficial in addressing Avery’s time pain points.
Problem Statement: Avery is a busy working professional with an unpredictable schedule that leaves little time for meal planning and preparation. Avery needs a quick and easy solution to order from a variety of healthy meal options so that they can spend more time pursuing hobbies and social activities.
Mapping Avery's user journey revealed how helpful it would be for users to have access to a dedicated Cee’s Restaurant app.
Paper Wireframes
To ensure that the digital wireframes of the app were well-suited to address user pain points, I took the time to draft iterations of each screen on paper. When designing the home screen, I prioritized a quick and easy ordering process to help users save time.
Digital Wireframes
During the initial design phase, I incorporated feedback from user research and peers in the Coursera course to create the wireframe screen designs.
For a usability study, I created a low-fidelity prototype, using the completed set of digital wireframes, with the primary user flow being placing an order for delivery.
Usability Study Round 1
I conducted two rounds of usability studies. Findings from the first study helped guide the designs from wireframes to mockups. The second study used a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockups needed refining. The primary findings in round one were:
1. Users want to order a healthy meal quickly
2. Users need more information on how they can edit their address
3. Users want an easier way to schedule an order
Usability Study Round 2
I conducted a second round of moderated, virtual usability study using a high-fidelity prototype to identify any aspects of the mockups that needed refining, improving, or changing. The findings from round two revealed that users found the checkout process to be too complicated due to the presence of too many unnecessary steps.
Mockups
Early designs allowed for limited date selection but after the usability studies, I added additional options for selecting date and time.
The second usability study revealed frustration with the checkout flow. to streamline this flow, I consolidated the “Current order” and “Checkout screens” into one “Order summary” screen. I also added the pickup or delivery option to this screen.
DELIVERABLES
Key Mockups
High Fidelity Prototype
The final high-fidelity prototype presented clearer user flows for ordering quick and easy meals. It also met user needs for a more efficient checkout process and navigational concerns. Click here to view the Family Diner High Fidelity Prototype.
Accessibility Concerns
In this project, I investigated the use of Adee in Figma to generate alt text for images, making them accessible to visually impaired users who rely on screen readers. I also incorporated icons for easier navigation and employed simple, intuitive labels to enhance overall user experience. Detailed imagery was used for dishes to improve user comprehension of the design.
TAKEAWAYS
Impact: The app makes users feel like Cee’s Restaurant thinks about how to meet their needs.
One of the comments from my peers was: "I found the app really user-friendly to navigate, and I was impressed by how easy and straightforward the ordering process was. I would definitely use this app to order a quick and healthy meal."
Lessons learned
While designing the Cee's Family Restaurant app, I gained valuable insights into features that I initially assumed would be intuitive but turned out not to be, based on user feedback. This underlines the importance of user testing to ensure that all users' needs are met because their satisfaction is very important.
Hypothetical Next Steps
1. Conduct additional usability studies to confirm if the users' pain points have been effectively addressed.
2. Perform further user research to identify any new user needs.
