RESEARCH

Understanding the users

The team conducted multiple rounds of customer interviews with college students at UCSD to discover their needs and new product opportunities revolving around food and transportation.

Takeaways

• College students find that food delivery is too expensive for their budget.
• Students that don't own cars have to rely on other people for transportation.
• Cost and convenience are two main deciding factors for students when it comes to getting food.

Meet Alex and Christina

Based on the interviews, I synthesized the findings into two personas with different needs, use cases, and motivations. The team, developers and managers used these personas to inform design and product decisions, like prioritization of features in the minimum viable product (MVP).

Alex - the student with no car

Christina - the student driver

The user journey and flow

The project manager and lead front-end developer provided me with a user flow and product requirements for the web application that was pre-determined before I joined. We worked together to better understand and flesh out the flow based on the research conducted.

Testing this new concept

To make sure our product was viable and easy to understand for our users, I suggested that we should run some tests during this wireframe stage. They were thinking of waiting until the MVP launch to test, but I argued that it was more valuable to test early and wouldn't take much resources. I created a low-fidelity prototype on Figma and tested it with 8 participants and synthesized the research findings into a spreadsheet to share with the team.

Before

After

Key areas of improvement

• Users wanted a simple browsing and ordering experience, they didn't want to click too many times just to view the menu and move forward with their order.
• We had included a filter by day of the week feature, but found that users wouldn't know what they want to eat days in advance.
• Users wished to see how far away certain deliveries or trips were before making an order.
• Some of the copy and actions were unclear to users like "# Orders Left" on the trip and the difference between the "View Menu" and "Order Now" buttons.

A growing project

With these findings in mind, we were able to develop the branding and hi-fidelity designs for the application. We met with stakeholders to ensure our branding matched the company values and went through many iterations to land on what we have today.

The scope of the project also increased as we brought a new product manager. We added in new features and ideas based on user feedback and competitor research, specifically the ability to explore and search for restaurants and the ability to view past trips and order history.

browse by restaurant

find ongoing deliveries in the area

going somewhere? post it!

want delivery? request it!

find orders to pick-up and deliver

view your ongoing and past orders

PROTOTYPE & TEST

Planning and building the prototype

With the launch of the MVP on the horizon, design and development are worked in tandem to make the launch happen. However, I still wanted to conduct testing before launch to validate our ideas and designs while development was happening. I created a usability test plan which focused on testing user understanding and the overall design of the platform.

I built one interactive prototype that covered both use cases and more. The prototype take the users through the entire browsing, ordering and checkout flow, as well as the posting and requesting features. You can check out the Figma prototype below!