Picnic
More and more people are turning to plant-based diets for sustainability reasons and the number of vegetarians and vegans is increasing. But eating out with friends can be a stress factor, and it can be hard to find restaurants that caters to everyone.
Picnic helps people who wants to eat plant based keep to their diets, by solving this problem. At the same time, the product is an educational source for people to learn about their friends food restrictions.
Project type
My Role
Timeline
Problem
From exploratory interviews conducted, I discovered that eating with friends can be a huge friction when trying to navigate a vegan or vegetarian diet. Many people are also unaware of the environmental impact that going plant-based can have.
Solution
By making a digital product that makes it easier for friends with different diets to find a place to eat together, we can help people who eat plant based to keep to their diets. At the same time, the product can be an educational source for people to learn about their friends food preferances.
Problem discovery
While reviewing literature during the desk research phase, I found that adapting a plant based diet is one of the most impactful actions an individual can take on climate change, as the meat industry is one of the biggest polluting, and resource depriving industries there are. I also read articles on how more and more people are in fact trying to adapt to these diets for sustainability reasons.
Interview insights
From interviewing a diverse group of people, including people who are on plant-based diets, people who have tried and given up, and people who generally care about sustainability but have not tried to adjust their diet, I was able to gain a few actionable insights about attitudes, pain points, and areas of opportunity. This also led to the main HMW statements.
1.
How might we make it easier for friends that keep different diets to eat together?
2.
How might we inform about and encourage sustainable eating?
Ideation & testing
After a few rounds of ideation with the other students, I had a good amount of ideas for solutions to these how might we statements. Some were combined, some were scrapped, and there were 4 left to test as low-fi prototypes.
Now, after testing these ideas as low-fi prototypes and receiving feedback from users, I saw that the one solution focused on helping people eat together was clearly favorable.
The solution was to make an app where friends can share their diets, and then search restaurants and filter with their friends profile.
I felt like this idea was a clear MVP solution to one of the biggest pain points that came up during research. And a solution that could hopefully end up preventing someone from giving up on their diet.
Through putting up a quick mid-fi prototype, and doing some A B testing of different user flows, I got some insight into how the app should work in terms of filtering and showing results.
Defining
The next steps of the process was to define further what features the app would have. For this we used the MSCW method.
At this point I also realize different ways I could incorporate education on different diets into the product.
The system map helped with sketching and designing the final UX of the app, along with looking at competitors to define common design conventions.
High-fi prototyping
Branding
A big part of the branding was the idea of using shapes to communicate different diets. So these shapes are reoccurring in profile images and as icons, and the complexity of the shape is related to the complexity of the diet.
The logo also draws from these shapes.
Testing
Some quick tests were conducted with the first and second version of the final UX and UI. Based on feedback the navigation was a pain point that was solved in the final iteration.
Final prototype
Adding friends as filters
Most important task of adding friends as filters and searching is available right when you open the app. Confirmation images near the search button reminds users who they selected.
Browsing restaurants
On the restaurant cards and pages you can see a match score of how well the restaurants menu matches your friends diet. Together with the shape icon that correlates to the friends diet.Menu is high on the page because that's something people mentioned early on during interviews that they always have to check the menu to see what there is to eat.
Share list
A feature that tested well in mid-fi, was the idea of being able to share a list of potential restaurants with friends in the app.This also enhances the social aspect of the app, and differentiates it from other platforms further.
Friends profile and diet
Read about a friends diet in the popup on their profile. You can easily see what they eat and don’t eat as well as different reasons a person could have for being vegetarian.Access friends profile on card next to checkbox on the homepage, or see a list of friends in your user hub.
Next steps
Information about all diets needs to be more easily available. By adding a directory, users can browse all diets regardless of which their friends follow.
Also, one of the features that has been suggested by users several times when testing is the ability to make groups of friends and easily choose and search by groups. By adding this, I think it would improve the usability of the app even more.
Once this is done, there needs to be more usability testing conducted by giving participants tasks and letting them navigate freely.
