Our Foodie Friends app is a meet-up app that focused on leading with food. Where users select their food preferences and gender, they are interested in meeting their budgetary constraints, and the app does the rest.
Identified the problem that we set out to solve, worked alongside colleagues to conduct research, developed personas, facilitated interviews/testings, and created wireframes.
“ I would be comfortable meeting strangers if there was a feature that would verify users based on mutual connections” – Alex
Foodies need an easier way to try new foods and restaurants when their peers can't join them in the experience.
To connect like-minded individuals based on food and restaurant preferences.
The app idea was originally to create a dating app; we began by creating a proto-persona that best represented the user type that might use a dating app.
Based on research, we found that most of those who use dating apps are men; we figured a person who uses a dating app is generally unafraid of meeting new people and is eager to socialize with someone new.
When we initially set out, we intended to create an app that was a take on tinder know as “Chicken tender,” where we would match people romantically strictly based on their food cravings.
Through preliminary conversations and research, we decided the marketplace was a bit over-saturated with dating apps. There was more of a need for a platonic meet-up app targeted towards foodies. The users could expand their social network through their shared love of food. Thus, Foodie Friends was born.
To create an app that connects people through food or restaurant preferences. Focuses on matching people based on food interest—matching people based on restaurants they want to try. Seeks to use food from connections.
User interviews were conducted via zoom with 4 participants; each session was held for approximately 30 minutes.
Once our initial user interviews were completed, we could construct an affinity diagram from the results. This allowed us to process, sort, and identify critical insights into the information we gained from the users. From there, we generated and consolidated the data related to the product and the problems we wanted to solve.
Users will want to use an app to make connections with strangers over a meal.
Michelle, a Marketing Director with limited free time, needs to find an easy way to discover new restaurants and meet new people because her demanding career leaves no time for a social life.
We believe that food is a standard connection between all people. Foodies need a way to try new foods quickly, discover new restaurants and form new relationships. How might we connect like-minded people over the common interest of food?
Foodie Friends connects people based on food and restaurant preferences for food lovers looking to spice up their life. We make it easy to broaden your friend network, try tasty foods and explore new restaurants.
Creating a storyboard helped our team communicate our mission for creating the app both internally and externally to shareholders. It helped us address: who was our redesign targeting? Why would a user want to use our app? It also allowed us to understand the flow of interactions someone might have with the site.
Creating user scenarios creates a reliable narrative to use as a guide. To ideate towards an accurate picture of our user, their world, and how our solution might solve their problems best.
Now that we had a sense of who our primary user would b, we needed to hone our ideas. To allow ourselves to brainstorm with no limitation, we created an “I like, I want, What if?” diagram.
This allowed us to take advantage of all seven rules of brainstorming created by IDEOU:
Creating a feature prioritization matrix helped us to identify the most critical problems to solve first. During this process, we kept the users and the business needs at the forefront.
Subsequently, we thought through our user flow. This process allowed us to think through our design before developing the whole app. By taking this step, we were able to keep the user at the forefront, making sure we addressed their needs and solved the correct problems without getting too deep into the project.
This step is extremely helpful. It allows one to see a visual layout/roadmap of the user flow, providing the opportunity to think through each step and eliminating the possibly of omitting a step.
To understand the competitive landscape, we conducted a deep-dive analysis of direct and in-direct challengers.
To our surprise, there was more competition than we thought. However, there were opportunities to improve the user’s experience in finding a place to donate and alleviating pain points that the competition missed
Based on our paper prototype usability tests, we determined that Jenn created an intuitive onboarding experience. I focused on our app's food aspect, so we chose to go with my design, which included a “restaurant of the day” portion. Kellie focused primarily on profiles and how a user would find a match through the swiping feature. Mallory had a robust chat design and a powerful idea of organizing our partners in both pending and mutual matches.
After wire-framing and initial usability testing was completed, we started styling the user interface.It was essential to keep it clean, simple, and fun and keep elements of the app similar to those of those popular apps that the users were familiar with. The intent was to eliminate any ample learning curves that come with navigating anew interface.
To my pleasant surprise, the experience was terrific. The group, comprised of highly creative and passionate individuals, was very spirited and opinionated. Instead of this being a negative, it allowed our creativity as a team to thrive.
They are allowing users to match and meet in groups which would include a group chat feature. Allow users to only search candidates that work at the same company (for more prominent companies). Create a way to verify users’ authenticity to create a safe environment. And lastly, explore a feature that would connect through Facebook to check to see if users have a mutual connection with you (a friend of a friend).
