Foodē (pronounced 'foodie') was a business idea developed by some students I worked with during my capstone course at UMSI. Their goal was to create a platform where users could give private feedback to restaurants who could in turn reward helpful feedback with coupons for future purchases. When my team and I were brought onto the project, the Foodē team had already created a feedback questionnaire prototype using Typeform and formed a relationship with Salads UP, a local restaurant, for testing the product.
Project Overview
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Client name: Foodē
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My roles: User research, product design, user testing, programming, marketing
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Tools/skills utilized: Agile methodology/Scrum, React Native, Adobe Premiere Pro, field interviews, user interviews, usability testing
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The key problems to solve: How can we motivate people to leave feedback for restaurants? How can we make the review format easy to fill out on the go, while keeping it detailed enough to be useful to restaurants?
Research Findings & The Design Process
Research & Ideation
We started with conducting on-site user tests with restaurant patrons at Salads UP using the existing Typeform prototype.
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General consensus was that people liked the idea of leaving feedback for restaurants if incentivized with a reward, but found the Typeform too long and complicated to fill out on the go
Building the App & Last Steps
After choosing which designs to build, we started coding a working prototype of the app.
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Since I was a beginner at React Native, I stuck to working on the simpler pages, mainly the login/account creation page and the shorter review page, which consisted of a few sliders and textboxes
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We built both the short and long review formats into the app, and once it had enough functionality, we conducted more user tests (with our housemates this time, as pandemic restrictions were now in full swing)
Next, we brainstormed some ideas for how we could make the act of leaving a review simpler and more engaging, and then gave feedback on each idea.
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My idea was to use a radar plot to allow users to rate restaurants on many aspects without the need for scrolling or going through multiple pages, with an optional text box or multiple choice question to display for low ratings to let the user elaborate
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My teammates liked the novelty of it, but some of our test users had trouble understanding it, so we decided on adding a progress bar to the review and giving the option to fill out a shorter review or a longer, more in-depth one for a larger reward, which were our most popular ideas
While users liked how straightforward the shorter review format was and appreciated the level of nuance afforded by the sliders as opposed to binary 'positive'/'negative' options, the longer format ended up being the most popular overall due to the greater level of detail, so we removed the short format and created our finalized, most refined prototype. As my final contribution to the project, I put together a marketing video demonstrating the app's main features:
Project Reflection
Outcome
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With our initial interviews, we got an idea of how feasible the overall premise of the product was (that is, that people would be willing to take the time to leave feedback for restaurants if incentivized with possible rewards)
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Testing our different ideas at multiple stages allowed us to determine and refine the most user-friendly method for leaving feedback
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Using the findings from our research, we were able to complete a functional prototype of the app that included all of the major user-side features and deliver it to our product owners
Challenges
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Starting out, the Foodē entrepreneurial team wanted to go in certain directions that, after careful consideration and research, we felt didn't make sense, including the addition of a social media sharing side to the app (which conflicted with the premise of anonymous feedback) and a system of leveling up and earning badges (which didn't appeal to most interviewees)
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Looking back on our testing and interviewing methods, there were several issues that may have affected the outcomes:
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The most popular idea in our first round mainly seemed to be popular specifically because it told the user upfront that there would be a reward upon completing the review, and we failed to communicate that we intended to display that message beforehand for all of the review formats we were showing them
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For the second round, testing preferences between the shorter and longer review formats, the short format we used had been modified at the last minute to only display a text box if a low rating was given, meaning that users who didn’t give any low enough ratings didn’t know there would be a text box option; the original idea had been to display an optional text box at the end of the review no matter what ratings were given
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Not being able to film anything out in the ‘real world’ or demonstrate our product at Salads UP due to the COVID-19 pandemic made making our marketing video more challenging, but I was able to find enough free stock footage and combine it with screen recordings of our app to edit into something that I was still proud of