Chow - Mobile App UI/UX Design
Mar - May 2022
"A food app
made for foodies."
About
Sometimes, finding new unique and interesting restaurants can be a chore. While there are tons and tons of apps present in the food industry, I wanted to make something unique, just like the restaurants that it will help people discover.
The result was chow: a food app that focused on foodies, people who love food and eating out, and are always on the hunt for the next unique and interesting food spot.
Role
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Research
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Problem Validation
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Ideation
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Wireframing
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User Testing
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Visual Design
Goals
1 / Project Goals
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Make it easy for the user to find new unique restaurants
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Motivate the user to find and try out new places to eat
2 / Business Goals
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Restaurants will be able to attract new customers easier
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Revenue increase for restaurants
Design Process
Research
Wireframing & Prototyping
Synthesis & Analysis
User & Task Testing
Problem Validation
Learnings & Findings
Ideation & Concepting
Visual Design
Target Audience
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Enjoys exploring food (different cuisines, types, etc.)
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Like to eat out
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Tech savvy
Takeout
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What are the most important factors that influence your experience getting takeout?
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Tell me about your good & bad experiences.
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What are your pains and joys during the takeout process?
Eating out
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What are the most important factors that influence your experience eating out?
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Tell me about your good & bad experiences.
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What are your pains and joys during the eating out process?
Finding a new food place
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What are your motivations when you decide to try somewhere new?
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Walk me through your process in finding and deciding on a new place to eat.
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What are your biggest factors and concerns?
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Tell me about your pain points and frustrations when finding a new place to eat.
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If I give you a magic wand, what would you change/fix about the overall process?
Research
Synthesis
Learnings
& Findings
Pain Points
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Indecision when choosing where to eat.
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Lack of certainty and speed gathering info.
Motivations
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Trying out new foods and cuisines & follow food trends/hype surrounding new and unique places.
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They are outside of their local area and want the ‘foodie’ recommended places in town.
The Problem
The Foodie wants to find new unique dining experiences that are highly rated or in the “know” from local foodies like them, whether it be in their own city/area or somewhere else entirely.
The Solution
To create something that will help the Foodie find the unique and interesting new places to eat that they are looking for, that are highly rated by foodies just like them.
Sketches
Chow’s unique feature is its monthly rewards system:
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Users get rewards for going out to different restaurants and leaving reviews.
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These reviews determine which restaurants are highly rated.
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The most highly rated restaurant will become the restaurant of the month for the following month.
Wireframes
Find a restaurant and look through it.
Does the home screen make sense to you?
Is selecting the weekly food picks section an intuitive process?
Does the restaurant page offer you enough info about the restaurant?
Is anything lacking in this page?
Do you think the order and way the info is presented makes sense?
Check in at restaurant & leave a review.
Is the checking-in flow/process intuitive?
How do you feel about the number of steps it took to check-in?
Does the place where you type the review make sense?
Do the steps in posting the review & picture to instagram feel natural?
What do you think about the overall checking-in, leaving a review & posting a picture user flow?
Check your monthly rewards progress.
Does the monthly challenge/rewards screen make sense to you?
Is it easy and intuitive to locate and see your rewards progress?
Are the bars for each rewards level intuitive and easy to see?
Did you think that the rewards section was clickable?
What do you think of the expanded rewards section? Was the extra info it has expected?
Lo-fi wireframes
User Testing
Next, it was time to conduct some user testing in order to Gai some feedback on my wireframes and see what improvements I could make for the next iteration.
Synthesis
Learnings
Home Page
One of the biggest issues was the info presented on the home page. Most of the users tried to scroll down on the home page when they wanted to browse thru restaurants. Another big issue was that the ‘Last Visited’ card confused them and did not fit in the home screen.
To fix these issues, I moved the ‘Last Visited’ card to the monthly challenges tab as it fit the purpose of that screen more. Also, I made the home screen scrollable and made the function of it solely to browse through and select restaurants.
Monthly Page
The monthly page was too similar looking to the home page, and one particular issue was with the ‘Current Top 3’ section. This section was meant to show the top 3 rated restaurants from the month, but some users found that it looked like something from the home page or a top 3 restaurants of the user, not for the month.
To fix this, I kept the ‘Current Top 3’ on the page, but I changed the way it looks to a podium/leaderboard style. This makes it clear to the user that it is a top 3 of the month ranking and not a user list/restaurant selection.
Leaving a Review
Users found the checking-in and leaving a review process to be slightly confusing and unclear. The check-in flow should lead more into the review flow.
I improved this by adding a review button to the ‘Checked-in’ status screen, so that users can immediately go to the review screen, as well as changing the start review flow to be more visually significant.
Visual Design
Final Screens
