Taste

Taste is a social media-based platform for food lovers to share and discover their beloved dishes and authentic recipes from people who have the same food interests from anywhere, everywhere. While being the only designer in the company, I helped the team build a design system, iterated the product structure, and designed a mobile application from a low-fid prototype to the finalized testing product.

10 month
2 developer — 1 designer — 1 marketing consultant
Research — UX/UI design —User testing —Minor graphic design

All started with…

When I first joined the team, the team’s overall vision was to create a product that is targeting young adult food hunters. I was given three profile pages as a starting point. Some concerns and questions that came to my mind were:

Who would be our end-users? What would be their living habit? Specifically what generation?
When they would be using the product? Could we think of any scenario? Could we think of a case where the end-users will rely on our product?
Where could our product take our end-users to? Could we take our users from point A to point B? What would be the ideal timing?
What are the keywords/terms the end-users would want to search? What feature would need? What pain point could we help to solve their problem? What would the word “authentic” mean to the end-users?
How could we improve the accuracy of the entire food hunting experience (from frustration to a satisfied emotion)? How could we predict and how could we give recommendations?
Why does the end-user want to use our product? What would be our selling point and why the feature is unique?

The three starting screens I was given to work with.

I also value group communication as well. I was also wondering how could we work remotely as a group? And how could we build trust? How could we set deadlines? Any sprints? How could we develop the workload?

Research & Explorations

I started by conducting a competitor analysis, my goal was to understand the market and analyze the pros and cons. Then, I conducted some user interviews, I wanted to understand the market’s needs, and see if my hypothesis was validated.

Key Insights

Users reply on Yelp more for photo references instead of reviews because they know the reviews could sometimes be questionable.
Most users like Google Maps for more accurate ratings and reviews.
The UI on Doordash favors many young adults.
The font size for OpenTable is small for users to read.

The insight/comments I observed from Yelp and Google users, some interesting direct feedback were the food hunting experience is well linked to the user’s emotions. They could be overwhelmed and even more frustrated after searching for 30min with no answers.

I also interviewed two restaurant owners, to understand some information on how restaurants do promotions to attract their customers, some of the interesting insight I got was third party companies like Doordash charges a significant amount for their service. Restaurant owners use platforms like DoorDash or UberEats as an advertisement, but they are not a big fan of the third party delivery system because of the expensive charges.

Overall, some of the key findings throughout the exploration journey:

Food hunters usually scan (0.3-0.5 sec) through photos for food.
Food hunters rely on photos more than verbal content.
Food hunters are heavily dependent on previous orders/posts when it comes to food hunting.
Hangry exist
Emotions ties up to what food the users are searching for.
Restaurant owners are seeking a bridge to communicate with the customers

Brainstorming & Ideation

I did some housekeeping work on the legacy screens that I was handed and conducted some flaws and strengths that the group originally had.

Based on the information and data we got, my team and I started to brainstorm which problem we needed to prioritize. We started by considering "the big picture questions” such as How might we identify the users? How might we reduce the searching time? and How might we connect the restaurant and users together?

For phrase I, we wanted to test out the market and narrowed our focus on one target audience to solve one problem/struggle. Therefore, we narrowed our question to:

How might we improve the user search accuracy with efficiency?

Targeting: Food hunting users, mostly from 16 to 30-year-old.

Designing new features and revamping the old pages required me to brainstorm not only the design, but how to re-introduce TASTE to the current users, and how to tell a story to convince new users to join us and be onboard. I explored different solutions with different sketches, then I discussed them with the team, and provided a few most feasible solutions to the table.

Based on our research and survey, we learned that different customer has different needs, especially “favorite” food is a subjective category. We then analyzed the feasibility for each direction and figured out that all these four directions can be incorporated into one product (a phrase I).

Goal: Share food hunting experience through dishes instead of restaurants.

For phrase one test release, we limited our product to:

Profile page
Onboarding (For new users only)
Food Explorations
Community (News Feed)

For:

New registered users
Returning users

Our team explored different solutions and sketched out the user flows. It took me about 4 hours of making, from sketches to high-fid wireframes.

Early Mocks- Matching/Discovery page
Early Mocks- Matching/Discovery page II
Early Mocks- Information page II
Early Mocks- Searching
Early Mocks- Home page

Wireframes (Mid-fid)

Finalized Screens (Phrase I)

Profile page - share bookmarked places and shared food maps

the COVID…

The company was affected by the COVID-19 and announced bankruptcy. Our team and I would develop furthermore features like Membership, and have the vision to create a bridge system between restaurant owners and the customer directly.

TASTE