Food.Ly
A Location-based healthy food suggestions app. My Introduction to working as a UX Designer
Initial Research
To Begin.
When learning about student eating habits, my team and I started to notice that many had very understandable concerns about finding healthy food on a student budget so ran various semi-structured interviews to better understand the problem and our potential users.
Affinity Mapping
Before the interviews, we had a general idea of what we wanted for the app but the interviews shifted our focus massively as we began to focus more on locations, deals and incorporating the app into daily life and less as a straightforward food app.
Competitor Analysis
Then, we began to compare and contrast popular food and restaurant apps to see what we could do to improve the overall app design. For this we each got a specific app to use for a week, and we looked at ways we could improve our design. I used Trip Advisor and began to design the app’s map interface to utilise that design element in our app. During this stage, we focused on developing the functional elements of the page.
We chose 4 Apps
Personas
Parker's persona was designed to be the typical user for the app, allowing us to model her as someone who would already feel positively about the app
Jordan's persona was of someone who was less likely to engage in habit building or someone who may not engage with the app as we would have wished.
Violet was our hesitant user meaning we were able to discuss how to prevent issues in relation to how we built her persona.
User Journey Maps
What We learned from Them
Visual Design
We each created a mood board for what we wished for the app
This 1st mood board showed us the common design elements and functional aspects of the competitors UI and how we could utilise it to better our app idea.
We also created a mood board for how we want the users to feel
This 2nd mood board allowed us to take a more theoretical view of the app and how we wished the app would help users long term.
Low-Fi Prototypes
Our Prototype
This was made using Adobe XD, in hindsight I should have used Figma, a technology that I am now more comfortable with. We had some difficulties due to the timescale but the overall app met the design requirements covered in our initial research fairly well. If I were to improve this project, this is the part that I would work on the most.