About the project
The "Kai's Burger Shop" app, borns with the objective of satisfying clients with lack of time, who want to eat a burger at his favorite shop, without the need to travel or talk to anyone (also tackling language barriers problems).
Kickoff
For this project, we took a goal-directed design approach, which in our experience, is the best alternative for this case.
We will start with a kickoff meeting, and then we’ll continue with an industry analysis, a competitive audit, stakeholder interviews, a goal statement, user surveys and user personas development before continuing with iterations and future steps.
"What is the product
and the users?"
"Who are our biggest competitors?"
"What are the needs of our users?"
"What are our next
challenges?"
"What is our main
objective?"
"What are our limitations?"
User research and empathizing
We’re creating a Kai’s app, focusing on users that doesn't have time to wait in a line and pick up an order, or just prefer to have it delivered for diverse reasons. We’re also aiming to help our non-english speaking users by creating an intuitive app in various languages.
We also noticed that the apps of our competitors are working very well for them, so we trust that this project will help us to stay competitive and improve our sales.
Name: Adam
Age: 21
Occupation: Part-time work at computer shop and college student
Adam is a computer science student, at the University of San Francisco, and he is very applied. He doesn’t waste a minute when it comes to study and work because he was raised that way, and because of that, he tends to order food online to economize time. In his little free time, he likes to run at the local park, and tries to live a healthy life.
Name: Steven
Age: 40
Occupation: Police officer from Los Angeles
Steven is a police officer in Los Angeles, he is a loving father, but also a hard worker, who spends most of his day patrolling or attending emergencies. He was always very picky when it comes to eating, and that, added to the fact that he spends a lot of time at a car and alert to everything, brings him a lot of problems, that's why he resorted to fast food chains, that taste the same in every local.
Stakeholders
We interviewed our stakeholders to have a clear perception of their needs and concerns for this project. We also have to take in consideration our limitations in terms of budget and time before starting so we can set an appropiate schedule.
Preliminary product vision
Create an online ordering app for Kai’s burger shop, designed to be intuitive, simple and straightforward, while offering special benefits and rewards to users.
Business drivers
Create a steady revenue stream via user purchases, reach online shoppers to expand our target market and develop an intuitive interface with a straightforward ordering process.
Budget and schedule
This project won’t require a really big budget, but we’ll still require several engineers for production, and one or two to keep up with the app maintenance after launch.
Stakeholders perception
It is important to understand that we face a big competition, and that users will turn down the app if it doesn’t result quick and effective enough. People value their time over all things, so we have to keep that in mind.
Competitive audit report
After investigating our competitors, we discovered that they share a lot of characteristics, as well as some flaws.
Most of them have been in the market for quite a time, something that earned them the love of their clients, who expect the same experience to be delivered to them by others food chains, if not better.
Here are some of the opportunities that we discovered.
• Voice recognition system
• Specific recommendations for the user
• Language selection (Surprisingly most of the apps lack)
• Invite friends for rewards (Boosting downloads and promote the app)
• Adding the option to chat with the delivery
• Reward points for buying​
• Text reader (Which most of the apps lack)
• Favorite food category
Goal statement
As its name states, we summarized our main goal in a single statement to keep the team in the same line of work, and to remain focused.
"Our Kai's app will let users order food from their phones without having to talk to an employee, which will affect clients without time to go to the shop to order and wait in line, and those who can't speak english fluently, by providing a delivery or pick-up system with a detailed menu and various payment options. We will measure effectiveness by analizing how many people is buying from the app".
Main user flow
We outlined the main user flow with the objective of having a clear understanding of how the user interacts with the app, where we can make improvements, and how we can deliver a better experience in each of the stages.
Low-fi wireframe
After sketching a lot of ideas on paper we came up with our low fidelity wireframe. Our main objective was to make it as clear and intuitive as possible, allowing the users to travel back to the menus, settings and options at any time, as well as to keep track of their order easily from the homepage.
Note: this is not the final structure, as we made adjustments later after gathering feedback from usability studies. We made the final changes on our hi-fi prototype.
Usability studies and iterations
We created a prototype for our low-fi wireframe, and then prepared a usability study with six prompts that we conducted on sixteen selected participants, with the intention of gathering feedback to iterate, and improve our users experience
Tap targets
Some tap targets were having size problems, so we increased some icons and cards dimensions to make the interface more accessible.
Too many steps
Users had to go through four steps to complete an order, what was a bit to much and had to be reduced.
The app now requieres three quicker and simpler steps to complete an order.
Connection mode
Some of our users told us they have old smartphones, and they were concerned about the images loading times, so now we added a "connection mode" option, when users can opt for a "lite" version of the app with less content to load.
Item cards
Users declared that they didn’t know they could interact with some specific elements, so we transformed them into cards and gave them depth to ensure a more intuitive approach.
Style guide
The main colors (red and yellow) transmit emotion, happiness, and quickness, some of the core values that Kai’s burger shop aim to express.
This two used in conjunction will result very appealing for our user’s first interaction with the brand.
Intuitive
We focused on making everything intuitive: A quick menu at the top left, a shortcut to any of the app main options at the bottom, and an access to the user's profile at the top right, all of this elements stay fixated in the same position at all times, so that our clients can have a quick access to them without the need to go back. (We also included a section for the "frequent asked questions" in the "help" menu below).
Straightforward
We made the main user flow as straightforward as possible, dividing it in three steps with a confirmation to ensure that the user doesn't make any mistake in the process. We also added a button after the order is complete so that the client can track the delivery.
Card system
We divided every aspect of the ordering operation into card-like segments for users convenience, and to clarify divisions of elements.
All the tappable elements are organized at the right for a quicker access and greater intuitiveness.
Thank you for reading!
This was a standalone project where i learned a lot about prototyping and accessibility. I encountered issues that i never thought about through interviews and usability studies, like the need to add an option to help our users with slow internet connection and more. Definitively a very rewarding experience.