Zest
Community driven social media food app for small restaurants in need during the pandemic for Design for America.
Role UX Designer/Researcher Duration 9 months
Team Kavya Iyer, Grace Chun, Drew Favors, Gulsima Young, Olivia Oomen Tools Figma, Powerpoint
Overview
Design for America is an organization in which students are challenged to think about social problems in the world and come up with creative, innovative, and inspiring solutions. This process takes the whole school year, and with the help of mentors leads students through all stages of the design process.
This project took place in the depths of the pandemic, so all of our projects were focused on helping communities most affected by COVID-19. My team and I worked to create a product that will help small, local restaurants not only survive but thrive during and past the pandemic. We were all very involved in each part of the design process, but I was most involved in the UX design of the project.
Design Question:
How might we mobilize customer bases to foster social connections and convenience between a community and its restaurants?
Research
After looking at the information already available online, we sent out a consumer research survey which returned 120+ responses on habits of people dining during the pandemic and interviewed a small restaurant owner, Kate Willman from Eight Row. Here are some highlights:
From this, we saw affinity mapped and saw that there were 3 major takeaways:
- Access to information in one place
- Community role, connecting businesses with each other and their customer base
- Prioritizing convenience and safety, creating a balance
With our app taking more shape, we asked Informatics professor Jinha Lee for a consultation on our app idea. From meeting with her, we had three main points of app design that we wanted to emphasize on our app.
Design
Ideation
After the research phase, we begun ideating. Here are some of my sketches -- both for an app solution as well as a physical solution.
Information Architecture
We decided that an app would be the correct way to move forward with this project, as well as work easiest with our virtual workspace. We then moved on to planning our app out with some information architecture, including which features we wanted to include.
Design Language
Since we wanted a bright and fun atmosphere for our app, we chose a style that was fresh and friendly.
Wireframing + Design
We began to design what we wanted our app to look like, and bulk out our pages. Here are some later stages of my designs for the log in page.
Introducing Zest: a foodie's guide to mindful community eating
Here's a highlight of some of my favorite features from the app.
Login & Homepage
Our idea for Zest was to have a double-sided app where both customers and company owners can interact with their community. We primarily mapped out the customer user flow.
Home page features include recommended restaurants, deals, filters, and tags and reviews to help organize your search.
Send a Note
Our interview with Kate showed us how much personal connection made a difference to owners. It was crucial for us to give an easy opportunity for users to send support. This is a messaging feature where customers can send their favorite restaurant a meaningful note.
Food Boards
Finally, users can create shared boards and pin restaurant profiles to them. This feature was inspired by Pinterest, with our reasoning being familiar UI can help onboard our users faster. With this feature, we wanted to encourage exploration and collaboration among users.
Try it out yourself!
Reflection
This project is the longest project that I've worked on with a team and I can tell the difference. I think that having more time with each step of the process allowed me to understand the whole design process better as well. Because we had a longer timeline, we were able to go back and iterate more as well, or gather more research as we saw fit. I think this is reflected in our final presentation and product. If we were to spend even more time working on this, we would put more emphasis on helping the small business restaurant owners financially and change our app to adapt to the ever-changing status of COVID. This project was really rewarding because we were able to talk with real restaurant owners and see the impact that our app could potentially make in peoples' lives.
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