Roles: UI designer/ UX researcher
Project Overview
Client:
Our clients are a Southeast Asian couple who immigration from Indonesia in 2001. They worked in the restaurant business until 2008 when the economic crisis forced many restaurants into bankruptcy. They worked random jobs in and out of the food industry, but their heart has always believed in food as a common denominator for people everywhere.
They recently identified an opportunity to reignite their passion for the restaurant business by bringing their home-cooked Indonesian cuisine to the food truck scene. Demand is driven by reduced interest in large food chains and an increased desire for healthier, unique options.
While they don’t currently have enough profits to donate to charities, local causes in the community are very important to them. They noted getting inspiration from José Andres’ philanthropic model based in the impact he has made on the local D.C. community.
Problem Statement:
How might we bring fresh, delicious and nutritious food options to communities without access and support food and hunger issues in the process?
Solution:
To help our clients achieve their goal of bringing healthy Indonesian food to customers and give back to the community in the process we decided to launch Bali Kitchen, a fresh brand experience that will showcase their cuisine and desire to help the community through a food truck and companion mobile app.
Project Plan:
Competitive Analysis:
We researched successful food trucks and the applications often used to manage food trucks day to day functions to understand the landscape Bali kitchen would be entering on completion. Through this we were able to find specific best practices that we cold then incorporate into our app design.
User interviews journey mapping:
We interviewed a series of food truck customers to learn their points of joy and their pain points when eating at food trucks prior to Covid-19 and afterwards. Through these interviews we gained a clear understanding of customer expectations when eating at food trucks, their shift in eating habits since Covid-19, and the importance of healthy eating when it comes to takeout.
From this we were able to create a journey map outlining the experience of users eating at food trucks from beginning to ending. With this we were able to see where the pain point for customers occur and why.
Personas:
Finally we put all this information we learned to create two personas to help guide our design decisions. the Adventurer and the Maximizer.
The Adventurer is a person who goes to different kinds of food trucks for new and novel foods. Their biggest concern is being able to maximize the positive experiences of eating while avoiding the struggle of finding food trucks and waiting in long lines.
The Maximizer is a person who is interested in eating at food trucks but prefers to try things that they know they enjoy instead of risking spending money on a dish they will regret. They want to maximize their enjoyment of their food while avoiding financial waste.
Ethnographic research:
This part of our research was to learn more about the food and culture of Indonesia so we can leverage cultural elements for the UI design and features during the Design phase.
Wireframes and User flows:
Once we had our research together we decided on our features we would deliver at the end of the process.
Making healthy Indonesian food accessible -
When interviewing food truck customers we learned that many of them went to food trucks to experience unique and novel foods. But at the same time they were apprehensive to risk ordering food and not liking their order.
This became more of an issue with the fact that most Americans have little to no experience with Indonesian food.
So our solution is a comparison feature where users can select Indonesian dishes and see how they compare more familiar American dishes.
low fidelity wireframes
Reduce wait times in a Covid world -
One big pain point for food truck customers was having to wait in lines when going to their favorite food trucks. This was such a big problem that it could decide if they eat at the food truck or not.
Also with the changes brought on by Covid-19 many customers stated that their eating habits changed. Furthermore they said with the social nature of going out to food trucks they have cut down on eating at them out of safety.
So to help resolve the frustration and stress of both of these issues in the app the user can order their food online and select a specific pickup time that ensures social distancing during ordering, food prep, and pick up.
Donation features to give back to the community -
From our client brief we learned that they clients really care about how their business can give back to the community and wanted us to create a feature to allow for users to participate in the giving back.
We decided on a feature that would outline to the user different non-profits that the clients would partner with and give the user to donate directly to the partners through the app itself.
Next steps
Our next steps are to test the high fidelity prototypes with users and see where we can improve in the next iteration. Along depending on the results from that will determine if we will be able to add more features based on the research we have so far.
Thank you again for reading through our Bali Kitchen project
