Rethinking “going-out” meals

Project Brief

This was an explorative project where I was commissioned to design an innovative solution in the consumer F&B space. The intention behind the project was to develop a platform where consumers would be able to make restaurant reservations and submit food orders with ease.

ROLE

User Researcher
Interface Designer

Tools

Sketch
Invision

Design Process

Research & Synthesis

Our research process was primarily driven to discover existing behaviours and goals in a market in which we had little understanding of. This encompassed the user of user interviews to learn about their attitudes when it comes to eating out, and diary studies and contextual inquiry to study their behaviours. We sought to tackle the key areas of how they made meal arrangements with their friends, their behaviours and attitudes towards making reservations, how they dealt with cravings, how payment was managed, especially when eating out with their friends, and their attitudes towards eating.

To supplement this, we also conducted internal stakeholder interviews with business decision makers and developers to understand their objectives and constraints in developing the platform. Competitive benchmarking was also done to understand existing solutions in the market, and we analysed a wide-range of apps, from Chope and Burpple to Eatsy and Diningbutler.

Our findings helped us to create personas and map out their respective user journeys to understand their problems. What was remarkable to us was how fluid these personas were - an individual could cycle through all three personas within the course of a single day.

Problem

The problem that the social eater faced revolved largely around the frustrations that come with making meal arrangements with friends. They complained about scheduling problems, not knowing where to eat, and reservation making.

We found that these social eaters typically spent going a lot of time going back and forth with their friends trying to determine where to eat, what to eat and when to eat, because every participant would have a wide range of needs (eg not being able to eat meat, wanting something cheap, around 8pm and preferably in the west). They tended to spend a large amount of time individually going through various food review platforms trying to find something that would match all of these requirements, usually depending on a combination of blogger reviews, public ratings and word-of-mouth.

When they eventually find suitable options, they would list them in the chat group and put it to a vote in order to make a decision. Once all of that is done, the responsibility of making a reservation would be pushed around until “someone eventually does it”. We also found that these chat groups were mostly temporary - it was apparently common to create new group chats for every meet-up that they had with the specific attendees, and then dissolve the chat after the meet-up session had occured.

We wanted to build a solution that would closely match their existing behaviour while being able to solve their existing problems. This led to our first iteration of the platform, which combined the utility of a chat app and food review & recommendation platform.

Ideation

From a business perspective, there was also a need to drive user acquisition in the initial stages of the platform. As such, a decision was made to focus primarily on the social eater. In particular, the flow that we’d prioritise was the stage of users trying to make meal arrangements. At this stage, most of the behaviour was largely discovery, whether it be finding available friends or trying to figure out which restaurants to visit.

Our choice of colour came from two sources.

The first was derived from the intention behind the brand direction of the platform - both users and stakeholders spoke frequently about instantaneous delivery, reliability, flexibility, assurance and convenience. A key consideration was to use to convey this stability.

Undoubtedly, there were concerns about the suitability of using blue on an f&b platform - our competitive benchmarking showed us that related platforms had a propensity to utilise warmer colours, such as red, orange or yellow. This makes sense because such colours were able to better whet the appetite. However, we propose that having a colour that is so distinct from the existing solutions would help us standout better.

Secondly, it was also important that the brand identity of the platform could be translated across different verticals, as the intention behind the app was something that could be extended beyond services in f&b.

Solution