homefoods
createRU design-a-thon 2021
april 10th 12pm est - april 11th 4pm est
theme: design for your local community
Introduction
Over quarantine, we noticed that a lot of small, local businesses were struggling to keep up. Along with health concerns, employee layoffs, and a multitude of other factors, many restaurants had to adapt to the new circumstances by changing to takeout only, etc. We noticed this disconnect between local restaurants and their customers and wanted to introduce a solution.
Homefoods is a food app designated to match the services of local restaurants with those in need. It introduces a more social way of connecting people while retaining the same functions as regular food delivery apps.
Research
Pain Points for Small Businesses:
Lack of sufficient promotion
High commission fees from third-party delivery services
With this in mind, we decided to conduct some surveys and look into other apps to measure how consumers felt on the opposing side.
Conclusions:
People value deals and coupons, and are open to receiving notifications or updates about them
Preference for food cuisine varies among person to person, so having accessibility to all types of food is important
Although we would have preferred to do more research and receive more responses, due to the time crunch of the challenge we had to begin ideating from this data alone.
Ideation
First sketch
One key decision we made after analyzing our first sketches was that we would focus on both the business and customer aspect of the app.
For our second sketches, we took inspiration from other apps and tried to incorporate certain features into Homefoods. For example:
Instagram: home/search page, restaurant account
Pinterest: customer account
UberEats: perks/rewards, orders page
Second sketch
Prototyping
Typography
Color Scheme
Although we made a few low-fidelity screens, we moved quickly onto high-fidelity because of the time crunch.
We chose a commonly used sans-serif font so that the app could be easy to read and use and vibrant orange to highlight the text, icons, and background. Orange typically evokes feelings of change and vitality because of its association with changing seasons. We also thought a warm and inviting color would be the most suitable for a food app.
Cambo Box, a restaurant in New Brunswick that Rutgers students might frequent, was our inspiration for our prototypes. We wanted to emphasize key screens such as:
A search and discovery page allowing users to view and filter through their options
Personalizable profile pages for businesses with the option to follow/contact
Personal customer profiles, where users can create and design their own Pinterest-style “mood boards”
A perks and discount page, as our research indicated high user interest (81.8%)
Click on the images to view the final prototype!
Reflections
Since we were beginners, there were a lot of areas that could use improvement. Many of us were unfamiliar with graphic design principles and design thinking. Still, we made up for it through our strengths in brainstorming ideas, working together, and splitting the work equally. We agreed that some of our attention was misplaced and areas like user research and ideation could have been prioritized more to ensure that the features we designed were unique and usable. What we should have done:
Focus more on customers being the primary users of the app. We originally wanted to design the app for both customers and businesses but quickly realized this would take far too long for the constraints of the challenge.
Expand on the “social” aspects of the app, as its sociability was the main value proposition. Without key unique features, we are unsure how much Homefoods would have stood out against its competitors.
Better understand the dimensions of prototyping for iPhones, as some of our text did not fit the screens in our final designs (and other minor design mistakes).