Eateractive
A user research and design project that allowed me to work with family owned restaurants to create a product that would improve there work day experience
This was a ten week long group project that helped me learn the skills to start from the beginning with a problem statement and at the end create a high fidelity mock-up. For each section there will be a description of what the group did and what I did. I will also include an image when needed and a PDF to each of the files.
Problem Statement
For this part of the project we came up with a group and then what we want to focus on to help them. Throughout the first two weeks we refined the question based on the information we were able to get which lead to a final statement.
Final Problem Statement:
Family-owned restaurateurs need a way to improve customer dining experience before the restaurant visit, because owners often lose customers due to long and unpleasant waiting periods.
The Project Overview:
WHEN: Created during an upper-level undergraduate course on User Experience Design, in Autumn of 2017.
WHO: Our user group is family-owned restaurateurs.
WHY: Family-owned restaurateurs often struggle to compete with larger food chains, as they may not have the same resources and entrepreneurial experience more established restaurants have access to.
WHAT: An extension to existing Point of Sales systems (like Square), which adds four key features: restaurant traffic flow, a waitlist queue, an interactive menu, and a corresponding customer website.
HOW: Scroll down to see our process!
User Research
This part of the project consisted of a competitive analysis and a user interview. I did my analysis on UberEATS which is a way to order food online and have it delivered. This allowed me to understand why people might choose ordering over going to the restaurant itself. My interview was a small family owned restaurant and it lasted about 15 minutes. It was a semi-structured interview so that I was able to ask open ended questions and so that they were able to tell me more information.
Polished Personas
Using the interviews we created two personas that identified the key behaviors and motivations for the users. During this process we created rough drafts so that we were able to craft the right personas. In the end we created to personas: Mae and Eric. We used these two personas to make sure that we were creating a products that our users needed.
User Journey Map
In order to create this map we created a scenario from one of the personas perspectives. During there journey we created high and low points they could possibly have. On the map there are touch points to explain the persona's perspective when one of the high and lows occurred. We included the users thoughts, feelings, and actions to really try and represent how a restaurant owner would go about there day.
Design Requirements
After understanding how our users feel and how they go about there day we came up with requirements that should be included in the design. These requirements needed to be possible. Five of the requirements consisted of action, object, and context. The other five were data, functional, and contextual. Using these data requirements, we created storyboards that would fulfill some of these requirements.
Storyboards
These storyboards were about being able to create a product that the user might use during there day. Each group member created two storyboards: a drawing one and a picture one. The storyboards were used to understand different scenarios and different ways that we could pursue the product we are going to create. Once we combined all of our designs we decided as a group which route to go which lead to us creating information architecture about our product.
Information Architecture
This part of the project was a way for us to communicate the high level components of our system and to show the hierarchical relationship between all of the components. This is focused on the different pages the user might interact with, not the buttons they might press. Our architecture consisted of two sides which was the owners and customers side. The owners side consisted of a menu, queue, and wait time. Using the this information we created prototypes for every box seen in the information architecture.
Paper Prototypes
For this part of the design process we created three tasks that the user could test. We created the paper prototypes to be simple, but be able to show our intent. There needed to be enough prototypes so that we could test our designs. Each of us tested our findings with a somebody that could possibly be using it.
Annotated Wire frames
For this part of the process we created mock-ups of everything in our system. We kept them simple by minimizing color, not including pictures, and using very minimal text. On every page we described how the user can use the page and how it works with other pages. After creating these mock-ups we created a transition diagram to show how the screens flow.
High Fidelity Mock-ups
These were created on illustrator. We picked four screens that were significant for our product. The four screens were menu editing, queue, wait time, and an interactive menu for the customer. These screens were made and edited based on critique from other students in the design class. These high fidelity mock ups included color, pictures, and text that the user would actually see.
