PROJECT
Potluck
Reimagine how we enjoy food together.
CreateSC designathon- top 8 finalists
PROJECT
Reimagine how we enjoy food together.
CreateSC designathon- top 8 finalists
UX/UI design
24 hours
Adobe XD
Linh Le, Blanca Diaz, Neha Kuchipudi
Design a mobile app that enables users to build and maintain a sense of community with one another through digital events. How might we imagine future events and new ways to to stay connected with others while abiding to social distancing standards?
My team competed in CreateSC - a 24 hour UX/UI designathon and was chosen as one of the top 8 finalists amongst 60+ teams with our app Potluck.
When deciding which problem space we wanted to focus on, we gravitated towards our love for food and agreed to design an app that allows everyone to share their love of food while learning new skills. By narrowing down our topic, we had to redefine the challenge.
How can we design a better virtual experience for our users to continue to connect with friends and family through cuisine?
We interviewed 3 people in our target audience to determine how they feel about isolation and social interaction in quarantine. We wanted to focus on adults and young adults who enjoy making food and/or want to learn how to cook.
01 - Food and Drinks
Restaurants closure forced people to find alternatives, whether it's ordering take out or cooking at home.
02 - Learning new skills
With the extra time, a lot of us are learning new skills
03 - Connections
People crave that social interaction and people in quarantine need a way to connect with other people.
Using information from our interviews, we came up with one persona to represent our target audience - people who miss the social interaction want to connect with other people with similar interests.
By this point, we had gotten a better understanding of what was needed in the app. I was in charge of creating the explore and community page.
Live Cooking Workshops
ReFriends and users can sign up for the same live workshop and cook together, reinforcing connections even in quarantine
Live Feed/Explore Page
Friends and users can post pictures of their food to share, mimics the potluck feeling of eating and enjoying food together
Recipes Page
Friends and users can post their own recipes to share with friends
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After agreeing on some key features of the app, it was time for us to create some wireframes to get an idea of what the app would look like.
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Click to interact with my prototype!
Product Design
3 days
Figma
Linh Le, Nithila Ilangovan
We were presented with a challenge to create charitable giving solutions that are more accessible and inclusive. Through research, we realized that many people are hesitate to donate money to charities they don't know well or they might not have the financial ability to contribute.
We wanted to make sure that regardless of background and economic status, everyone will have the ability to give back to society.
Our solution is an app called Sharity that allows people to be matched with charities in their community which align with their interest and are legitimate. Users have the ability to volunteer their time as well as donate their money to support causes they care about.
Goal: We wanted to gather information about what motivate people to donate or volunteer. We interviewed 5 participants to learn more about their experience with charities and non-profit.
01 - Financial
Some people want to donate and give back to their community but don't have the financial ability to do so
02 - Trust
People are more motivated to donate or help charities and non-profit that they have researched and feel invested in
03 - Belief
Most of the time people want to know that their donations make a difference or how their money would be used
After doing our research, a user persona was created to guide our design decisions. Emily is a 20 year old college student who often feels that her donations are so small and wouldn't make a difference. Her goals and pain points helped us lay out some design foundation.
We also created some user flows to visualize a user's experience from start to finish. Our success criteria is that users will successfully sign up to volunteer or donate to a charity.
User Flow #1 - New users
User Flow #2 - Returning users sign up to volunteer
User Flow #3 - Returning users donating to a charity
We started our design process with some wireframes to visualize how our app would look and the flows before incorporating colors and branding.
Moving forward, we would like to conduct user testing sessions to see if there are any changes we need to make to the current version. This app was made in 3 days, and it still need a lot of attention in terms of design and usability.
Product Design
5 days
Figma
Linh Le
Prior to starting the Design Sprint, democratic voting between the members was used to choose food waste reduction as the problem space to focus on. Issues like natural resource depletion, greenhouse gases, and the growing number of landfills are directly related to the amount of global food waste.
Our solution was an all-in-one food waste management web app that makes it easy for users to find different ways to reduce their food waste including recipes, fermentation and storage methods. We also implemented a rewards system to reward users for reducing their food waste.
Define the challenge
We had the chance to talk to Alma Nejenhuis - a Food Waste and Environmental Studies educator in the Netherlands who started her own co-op. From our interview we learned that most food waste begins at home and that there are a wide-range of obstacles that make it difficult to overcome this. Alma emphasized that a big obstacle is that there isn’t a convenient way for all people to access reliable information about what they can do with food they already have and how they can make smarter choices when buying groceries.
After the interview, each person wrote down their own insights and dot voting was used to narrow down our HMWs in order to begin the process of deciding our long term goals.
With the top-voted HMW questions as a point of reference, each team member imagined what a solution might look like in 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years. We wrote our goals on sticky notes and were allowed to present them for one minute each.
Additionally, we employed the “Can We…?” method to take a pessimistic approach to craft our sprint questions which would be referred to throughout the rest of the sprint. By repeating the process outlined in the HMW section, the following sprint questions were chosen to accompany our long term goals -
To pinpoint the area where we could make the biggest impact, we used story mapping to determine the high-level steps required to achieve our goal. We started mapping the entire process of cooking at home from the planning stages to what happens after a meal.
After looking at places where our Sprint Questions would fit into the story map, we decided that we would create a product to help users reduce their food waste at home by making smarter decisions about the food they already have and what they plan to buy.
Curate and vote on best solutions
Define the prototype with a storyboard
After brainstorm and sketching what our solutions could look like, we agree on one final concept that acts as a guideline for our design.
Armed with our long term goals, sprint questions, final concept, and action steps, the rest of day two was dedicated to drawing the storyboard for our prototype. Our initial flow consisted of eight screens starting with an entry point of signing up for the app and the success criteria of users finding a reliable resource on the app for using the food they already have. With the storyboard completed, day two came to a close with a solid idea chosen and the plans for a prototype completed.
Prototyping
Day three was devoted almost entirely to creating the prototype of our app for our user testing the next day. The prototype itself was created using Figma and was worked on by the entire sprint team throughout the day.
At the end of day three, we ran a trial run of the user test to ensure that the prototype was working and that the tasks and script aligned with our long term goals and sprint questions.
Inventory Selection
Recipes
Community
Rewards & Discounts
User testing and iterations
We performed usability with 5 participants from age 25 to 35+ who are responsible for the grocery shopping and meal planning in their household.
Outlined
Benchmark Tasks
Task 1: You have extra food that you want to find a use for...try to use the app to input the food you currently have in your fridge/pantry to get suggestions on what to do with it.
Task 2: Now that you’ve added your food to the app, find a great meal idea for you to use after you come back from shopping later.
Task 3: You want to see what other people are saying about alternative food waste reduction options such as fermentation...where would you go?
Design Iterations
Our original app name was Reductiun, to emphasize food waste reduction. However, some people thought that name was awkward and almost everyone we interviewed dislikded it, so we change the name to Wastely.
The second feedback that we got was that pictures of raw meat might make some people uneasy, so we added an option to filter only vegetarian results and moved meat & seafood selections to the bottom.
Another feedback that we got was that people were confused on what validated on community articles mean, as they don't know who validated the articles and how reliable the source was. We solved this by adding who the article was validated by.
Through working on Wastely, I have learned a lot on how to collaborate with other people from different background, because each of us do indeed have very different background. There were times when we felt stuck, but we overcame it through strong communication and positive encouragement.
I also saw how important user research and usability testing was in coming up with a final design. There were things that seem right to us, but didn't seem right to our users. Through testing, we were able to see where people were getting confused and what parts didn't make sense to them. This process helped our team finalized a much stronger version of our design.
Product Design
UX Design
2 weeks
Figma
Linh Le
As a college student, I often find myself overwhelmed with school work and putting off everything until the last minute. I might start out strong, but as time progresses, I fall back into the same pattern of procrastinating. Surrounded by other college students and young professionals, I noticed we all encounter this problem once in a while, and this is where the seed for Motitask was planted.
Motitask is a mobile application that focuses on task tracking, helping users to stay on track and maintain motivations. It is designed to be simple and intuitive with a low learning curve to encourage utilization.
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Wanting to understand the roots of the problem, I did some research and here’s what I found -
Key Takeaway
Some task management apps are packed with too many features and can be overwhelming at first while others are too simple that its versatility is limited.I also noted down areas where improvements can be made such as productivity visualization, tasks prioritization/categorization and goal-achieving assistance.
As a college student, I understand the struggle of staying on top of my work and having everything organized, so I decided to focus on students and young professionals from the age of 18 to 28, who are still juggling school among other commitments, tech-savvy and open to new ideas. I interviewed five users in this age range, and participants were asked to share their experience with achieving a goal or finishing a project, whether it is personal or professional.
Goal: I wanted to analyze and gain insights on how people are tracking their work and understanding the struggles involved in maintaining motivation.
01 - Motivation
Users need a way to maintain their motivations because it’s their number one struggle
02 - Deadlines
People are more likely to finish their work if there is a deadline or someone is monitoring their progress
03 - Goals
People are more likely to achieve a goal when they relate to it or it is incentivize
04 - Reminders
People need a way to remember things they need to do
Emily represents people who are generally organized but struggle with time management and finding the right tool
Jake represents people who are spontaneous with multiple means of taking notes, struggle with keeping up with tasks
This is just a beginning of a much longer process to improve the usability and visual of Motitask. I am constantly amazed at how much I can learn through each case study, and the thought of being able to learn more about UI/UX design is what makes me keep going.
Iterations
After creating my lo-fi wireframes, I had to go through multiple revisions after several rounds of usability testing. I tend to get attached to my ideas and get tunnel vision, that sometimes I don’t realize the obvious mistakes in my design. Through testing and iterations, I was able to acknowledge my area of improvements and learned the vital role iterations play in the UX design process.
Visual design and prototyping
I noticed that I spend the most time in the UI design process, and I try to make everything look pretty and perfect. However, I believe the most important thing is that besides pretty visual, I need to be able to explain why I put each components where they are, as well as whether or not it is user friendly. The more I work on projects, the more I learn about color theory, consistent size and fonts, hierarchy rules and other UX/UI design elements. I know I still have a long way to go, and I am excited for that.