Sustain-A-Bowl
Mobile web app for a healthy, sustainably-sourced food truck
Background
Sustain-A-Bowl is a locally owned food truck that partners with and supports the Philadelphia Urban Farm community to source amazing, fresh ingredients. Our client needed an online presence and ordering system to reflect their casual, convenient, and simple dining experience.
One of the major challenges of this project was designing the experience in accordance with COVID-19 health guidelines (e.g. social distancing), while also enabling users to feel connected to both their local community and the business itself.
Contributions
- User research (interviews, data analysis)
- Solution ideation, feature design
- Wireframing, interface design, interaction design, high-fidelity prototyping
Timeline
This project lasted for about 7 weeks, from July 2020 to August 2020, with a team of three other designers.
Problem statement
"How might we use technology to cultivate consistent customer engagement, social impact, and increased revenue for the Sustain-A-Bowl food truck during a global pandemic?"
Research
Brainstorming
Before completing research, we documented our team's assumptions and pre-existing ideas from our own experiences with food trucks:
Methods
- Direct and indirect competitive analysis
- Semi-structured remote user interviews (~35 minutes per interview; 8 respondents)
- Respondents were selected based on their experience with food trucks and desire to eat healthy
Findings
User interviews helped us identify:
- What "eating local" meant to users (no chain restaurants) and ingredients must be in close proximity (regional) to the restaurant
- Taste is important, but healthy food has tremendous value
- Users often live spontaneously and don't necessarily plan primary meals in advance when they're busy
- A user's primary motivation is to find a specific cuisine — to satisfy a craving
- Users also heavily value convenience, while still valuing having healthy options
- People don't like to wait — food trucks should be quick; generally speaking, most users agreed that anything longer than 10 minutes is too long of a wait
Persona
With our research findings in mind, we created the persona of Travis to help us further empathize with the user and understand what kind of experience they need.
Journey map
By examining the current state of Travis' lunch journey, we were able to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement:
Design
Design principles
- Focus on the ingredients
- Our ingredients are our key differentiator and the foundation of our business model
- Whenever possible we should use images of our ingredients to reinforce the quality of our dishes
- Vibrant, well-photographed images bring credibility to us and our suppliers
- Make it easy to find us
- Make it clear where we are now, where we’re going to be
- Give access to our location in the navigation
- Provide convenient reminders in key areas of the user journey
- Make the user efficient
- Offer ordering online in advance of arriving
- Get users into the menu as quickly as possible
- Provide updates on their order once it’s been submitted
- Expedite the pickup process
User scenario
We then created a comprehensive user scenario for Travis, as a jumping-off point for our wireframes and final design solution.
Wireflow
Annotated wireframes
Design solution
The result was an interactive high-fidelity prototype that highlighted a typical user's flow. Solutions and features were research-driven and were designed to increase the user's efficiency and make the process of getting lunch more convenient. The processes of ordering food and checking out/paying were especially important and were designed with the user's goals and needs in mind.
We added a donation option in the checkout process to help fund local community gardens and to help users feel more connected to their community. We also included data on where food ingredients are sourced.
Next steps
- Usability testing
- Our next step is to recruit 5–6 users
- Usability testing will validate our proposed design solution and also highlight areas for further improvement
- Development and release
