Dine On!
Timeline
Role
Team
Tools/Skills
Summary
As a Cornell Student who has to eat, choosing where to eat on campus can be a very complicated task, you need to account for the menus of the dining halls, how much money you are willing to spend on cafe's, how close you are to the Dining Halls, etc. Dine on! is an app meant to streamline student's decision making process for selecting where to eat.
Prototype Overview
The Problem
As college students, we're constantly bombarded with decisions to make, especially within our campus walls where some of life's biggest choices will be made. From choosing our majors to navigating social circles, the last thing we want is to add more tough decisions to our plates – literally. When it comes to grabbing a bite to eat, it's not just about satisfying hunger; it's about finding a spot that ticks all the boxes. Will it be packed? Can we find a seat? How long till we get our food? And, of course, does it fit our budget? Faced with this maze of options, we realized there had to be a simpler way. So, we dreamed up Dine On!, an app that's all about making your lunchtime choices a breeze. Forget the headache of weighing pros and cons – Dine On! is here to help. By taking into account your preferences and using some nifty AI magic, it serves up dining suggestions tailored just for you. It's like having a personal food advisor in your pocket, helping you make faster decisions without all the stress.
The Users
To really unearth the problem we first need to understand the users. As a team we interviewed Cornell undergraduates and asked them about their painpoints related to food and the following 3 comments were the most frequent complaints:
In summary, Users face a multitude of pain points when it comes to dining on Central Campus. From limited food options and atmosphere concerns to overcrowding, subpar food quality, and location challenges, there's a clear need for a solution that addresses these issues and enhances the overall dining experience.
Ideation
We decided to make a mobile app because it would allow every student to access our solutions.
To begin our app ideation process we followed the Crazy 8's sprint method to come up with ideas to help us with our problem.
Brainstorming
As a team we selected 4 ideas we would like to pursue into higher quality iterations, and here are those 4 (the ones with stars on them)
Selected Features
people's rating of the food
We conducted research on apps that had the features we were looking for to see how they implemented them, and we conducted a SWOT analysis on the competitors.
The Apps we found were the following: Get Mobile (Top Left), Eatery (Top Right), Yelp (Bottom Left), Beli (Bottom Right)
We highlighted the specific features we liked and wanted to incorporate as our own.
Competitor Analysis
Mid Fidelity
Now that we had an idea of what the app would look like, we decided to make a mid fidelity prototype for it. This is the first iteration of it, out crudest design.
First Iteration of Mid-Fis
We were not totally satisfied with the results of this iteration, so we sought advice from some of our more senior designers and proceeded with a redesign, shown here:
Second Iteration of Mid-Fis
With this redesign we conducted some user tests to make sure the app was intuitive by giving our users tasks to accomplish.
Discarded Features
After the user tests, we decided to remove some features for differing reasons.
to accommodate for
team resources.
to not overcomplicate
the app
removed to make
reviewing less of a
commitment
Changes Based on Feedback
The users we interviewed gave us some constructive feedback and we made some changes based on their comments.
Our users requested an expanded finances view to see transaction history, to move the view more next to the header to make it more intuitive, and to remove the favorite locations from the profile because the locations did not matter too much in their eyes.
UI Kit
Here's the UI Kit we used for our High Fidelity design:
Final Design
This is the final High Fidelity design. It is the same 4 screens shown in the Mid-Fis, and all the changes based on feedback can be seen.
Reflections
This is my very first design case study, and overall I am very happy with how it went, when I started this project with my partner we were complete beginners at Figma, but coming out of this project we both felt very adept at the program. Writing this 3 months after finishing the project I have some thoughts on how to improve the actual design, but the project won't be touched anymore, it had its cycle.