Carolyn Yu

Overview

Dining out often involves company. People go out to eat with family, friends, or colleagues to enjoy time together while sharing great food. However, there are cases where people cannot find someone to dine out with, especially introverts. Therefore, we designed Meet-A-Meal, a restaurant social networking app that helps introverts to find potential friends who have common interests and build their food communities.

Our Process

Challenges

There are plenty of apps catering to new people in town and other foodies to socialize and eat together. However, there are not many apps specifically catering to Introverts in the social and restaurant industry space. Therefore, we would like to find solutions to this by basing our features on our research on Introverts.

Why introvert?

To understand how people find new restaurants to die at, how people meet new friends, and how people feel when they eat alone, we conducted a survey with 35 responses. The demographic breakdown and our finding are described below:

Demographics

• 83.3% are between 21 - 30 years old
• 77.1% are from the USA
• 97.2% are Students
• 88.5% are New York State Resident

Findings

• Even if the participant has no issues finding company to dine with them, they are still interested to meet and join other groups of strangers who have the same food taste as them.
• The majority of participants go out to eat at least 5 times per month, and prefer casual restaurants.
• Participants feel comfortable eating alone but would not mind eating with people that share interests
• The main reason to go out to eat is to socialize with others.
• 72% would like to meet new people

*Survey was sent out to Pratt’s Student Database. It consisted of 18 questions of demographics and preferences on social settings, eating out and personality.

After analyzing the data we collect, we confirm that there do have a need for people in NYC has the need of socializing and dining out. Then we separated the target audience into three groups: Foodies, Socializers, and Introverts.

However, there are already plenty of apps catering to new people in town and other foodies to socialize and eat together, but asking introverted people to socialize is not an easy task. Therefore, there are not many apps specifically catering to Introverts in the social and restaurant industry space. And that is why we choose introverts as our target audience in this project.

Learn more about our Target Audience

After we narrowed down our target audience to introverts. We started to do more user research on this specific audience through user interviews. We hope the user interviews would be able to help us come up with the core features for the Introvert target audience that would help them socialize through restaurant experiences with others. And also learned more about Introverts through secondary research - reading different articles relating to their behaviors and videos explaining more about them. In this phase, we interviewed with 6 inroverts to get an overview of how they tend to make new friends, how they find new places and their thoughts on dining out experiences.

Key Findings

• Sees popular restaurants online from influencers and social medias like Instagram.
• Looks up restaurants on google and yelp.
• Eating out alone is awkward.
• Willing to eat with mutual friends but feel weird with total strangers.
• Believe that companionship makes the experience memorable.

Empathy Mapping

After collected the data from the interview, we used Empathy Mapping to analyze what they felt and though during the process.

Persona

With the above information we gained, we create the persona to help us explain the user journey in the following section.

Landscape Review

To better understand the relevant features we gleaned from interviews. We organize and focus on applications in five categories: restaurant, events, social, payment, and safety applications.

After analyzing these 13 apps, we learn and get inspired by each feature.

Takeaways

1. Searching features should provide geolocation-based, filter-based, and recommended results.
2. Detail information should be categorized into sections and provide CTA buttons to enable quick actions for users.
3. Gamification elements may force users to use the service more often.
4. Allow users to explore the app before creating an account.
5. Payment features are usually used between friends who are familiar.
6. Users’ bio should provide info to show their personality and interest in food.
7. Considering Covid, users should be able to show their vaccination status.

Our Solution: Meet-A-Meal

What is Meet-A-Meal?

Meet-A-Meal is more than just a restaurant social networking app, it helps introverts to find potential friends who have common interests. It aims to provide people with the opportunity to be united and have an enjoyable time and build a community through the Meet a Meal social dining experience.

There are three main feature:

Search & Filter

A list is shown on homepage displaying nearby restaurants and meets. Various filters (e.g., distance, cuisine, etc.) can be applied to narrow the results.

Meet

Users can save, join or host a meet. The attendees are shown on the meet’s detail page to help users decide if they want to join.

Chat

When a group is created, users can message group members leading towards the meet and after. They are also able to DM individual members.

Design & Testing

Information Architecture

To evaluate the findability of each function of the proposed app information structure, we recruited 9 participants to do the Tree Testing with 5 tasks. According to the testing result, we learned that:

Tree Testing Stats

• 9 Participants
• 47% Correct answered
• 58% Directness
• 55% Found past events that they attended
• 78% Failed to find the hosting option for an event
• 88% Failed to join an event

Tree Testing Findinds

1. The participants had a hard time navigating through the tree testing as the labels were confusing and not clear.
2. Participants mistook ‘event’ as a formal meeting rather than a meeting and eating with friends.
3. When asked to host an event, the participants went to chat to add a friend instead of hosting an event in the restaurant page.

After having a deep understanding of the relationship and the feeling of term we use for the proposed app structure, we redesign our information architecture as follows:

Proposed IA of Meet-a-Meal App

Customer Journey Map

Design System

As a team of 6 designers, having a good design system makes collaboration more efficient and easier.

In this project, we also consider the accessibility design: color contrast at least reaches level AA and the element minimum size at least 24 px on the mobile device. Our design system is set up as follows:

Wireframe & Prototype

Base on the findings of Landscpae review, we create a Low-fidelity prototype on Figma to present our preliminary idea of our service.

Low-fidelity prototype of Meet-A-Meal main page

After the tree testing and interview with introverts participants, we redesign several elements and present our design in a High-fidelity prototype combined with the customer journey as below:

High-fideloty Prototype & User Testing

Prototype Link:

Try it on Figma

Takeaways & Next Steps

Through this project, I walk through the process between divergence and convergence, and learn the research methods from observing the challenges for the users through the interviews and how to narrow down those ideas into a specific target area. During the process, my team and I always keep users’ needs and challenges in our minds to find the solution to increase the findability of the proposed Meet-A-Meal App design. Also, during this project, I have learned about:

• The process of narrowing down our target audiences helped us to make the app better, as we added more features that were specific to introverts.
• It was nice to have real user testing and not assume what they would like as we did for our icebreaker games.
• It was nice having a design system as it made it easy for all 6 of us to work together on the screens.

In this project, we propose the Meet-A-Meal, a restaurant social app for introverted people who want to meet friends by going to a restaurant at a specific time on a specific day. In this project, we propose the Meet-A-Meal, a restaurant social app for introverted people who want to meet friends by going to a restaurant at a specific time on a specific day. Unfortunately, due to the time limitation, we only focus on the design of the three main features we proposed, but have not enough effort to address the realistic limitation of a social app. Therefore, in the next step, we should address the safety issue, such as the report stranger and vaccination status features, of the app to make the Meet-A-Meal app more realistic. And also start to consider the business strategy to make the proposed idea have a bigger chance to be implemented in the field.

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