Overview
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants have struggled to stay afloat. But as society transitions out of quarantine and business starts to return, restaurant employees face a great risk of infection despite current health and safety measures in place. In order to circumvent such risks, we created a solution that helps mitigate unnecessary contact.
In the span of ten weeks, we developed this project in an upper-level undergraduate course centered around Human-Centered Design. Utilizing the design process, we focused our efforts and research around restaurants located in University District, Seattle.
Team Members
Ashley Vu and Daniel LinDuration
10 WeeksMy Role
UX DesignerThe Problem
Every interaction between customer and employee now contains the risk of transmission from COVID-19, as even one case amongst employees can severely detriment their health and business for restaurants. This factor adds an additional stress point for any employee or restaurant owner, forcing employees to prioritize their wage over their physical wellbeing.
Problem Statement
How can we protect the health and safety of restaurant employees and create convenience for customers?
Our Solution
Transmitting food, not disease
Food Grab is a food delivery service that minimizes contact between restaurant employees and customers through the use of food lockers. These lockers are placed in central locations around University Way, allowing restaurants to store takeout orders. Customers are then able to access their food through our app. Food locker locations are pivotal in order to maximize convenience along with safety for restaurant employees and customers alike.
Our solution’s takeout system provides our users the best of both worlds as restaurants are able to maintain business from a distance while customers can eat with convenience.
User Research
We conducted three structured interviews with restaurant employees working on University Way. Connecting with our users allowed us to empathize with their needs, pain points, and day-to-day operations.
Key Findings
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Customers pose health hazards amongst restaurant employees
Regardless of dine-in or takeout options, there remains the inevitable risk of contact with delivery drivers and customers who may be carrying COVID-19.
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The restaurant experience shifted due to COVID
The pandemic has discouraged many to enter enclosed spaces of business, causing a drastic decrease of in-person dining and an increase in online orders.
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More time and money goes into restaurant sanitation
With increased health and safety regulations, restaurants frequently wipe down surfaces and high contact areas like handles. They also must keep a high supply of sanitation equipment, such as: mask, gloves, and
hand sanitizer.
Personas
We created personas based off of two groups of users: restaurant employees and customers. Through analysis of our research, these personas help visualize their desires, pain points, use of technology, and characteristics. This portrayal of our users acted as the guidelines for our designs, allowing us to constantly keep our users in mind.
User Journey Map
We created a user journey map to help us understand the user’s journey more. It helped us to identify scenarios the user goes through and what possible interactions they might encounter. After creating the user journey maps we better understood what points of their experience can be improved based on categorizing the user’s emotions at key touch points.
Ideate
Design Requirements
Based on our research insights, we then outlined our design requirements to best cater our user’s needs and desires. Defining the requirements was helpful in visualizing our solution. We envisioned how each requirement would manifest in our solution either digitally or physically since our solution required both components. We came out with a comprehensive list of requirements we found to be most beneficial and feasible:
Information Architecture
We created an information architecture diagram to visualize the interaction flows of our solution for both user groups since we cater to both the customer and restaurant employee.
The information architecture is a diagram that displays the hierarchy and flow of “locations” a user may find themselves at. It helped us to see the complete functionality of the solution and the visual organization of the elements that would assist in the function. By creating the information architecture diagram, we were able to identify areas of confusion in the interaction flow and add and reconnect frames accordingly.
Design
Paper Prototypes
Paper prototypes are the initial wireframes made on paper, but in our case, on the whiteboard. Through paper prototyping, we wanted to be able to physically visualize the flow of our main interface interactions, allowing us to figure out what screens and information would be needed for our users. Our diagram for information architecture helped guide our flow for our paper prototypes, allowing us to efficiently create our mock screens with an intended flow.
Evaluation Findings
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Better specify business metrics
Users liked the idea of viewing their business’ sale metrics, but would like to be able to view the data with more detail. They also wanted to see a more diverse range of metrics provided.
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Enhance visual clarity and ordering confirmation
Users noted that categories needed better labeling on the customer home page. And in order to increase navigational clarity,
we needed to create more
intermediary interactions. -
Businesses need a quicker way to view orders
Our previously designed order list overly minimized and compacted order information, which inadvertently hurt the user experience. The order list needed to contain additional order details for quicker viewing.
Lo-Fi Mockups
We created our lo-fi mockups based off our paper prototypes and user evaluations. By utilizing the feedback we received from our users, we were able to further refine our wireframes. This iteration acted as a detailed blueprint for our hi-fi mockups.
A Reflection on the Journey
I am very proud to have completed such a comprehensive project with my team in just 10 weeks: from user research, to formulating an idea, and creating a hi-fi prototype.
Our group's biggest strength was our teamwork. Each one of us approached this project with a diverse set of strengths — between the 3 of us, we shared different passions for user research, visual design, and prototyping. We learned to trust one another by relying each other's strengths, and employed frequent communication, respect, and planning to make this project come to life.
One of the biggest challenges of this project was lack of time. Because we devoted so much time to user research, we faced time constraints when producing our wireframes and prototypes. If we had more time, we would flesh out additional screens for our business analytics page, create tutorials for our locker system, and create a large-scale version of our
locker prototype.
Nevertheless, I am immensely satisfied with Food Grab, and so happy to share everything we've learned and accomplished along the way!