Trending Dish

Overview

Trending Dish is a mobile app that helps users find and share reviews. Users can follow their friends, chefs, athletes, celebrities, or their favorite food network host(s) and see what dishes they are currently dabbling in. They can also post dishes they ate themselves.

The app was in its beta stage. As a developer first, the client was apprehensive about his design. He wanted my teammate and I to evaluate and redesign what he had already created.

MY ROLE:
Usability Testing, Interaction Design

PLATFORM:
Mobile App

CLIENT:
Trending Dish

PROGRAMS USED:
Axure, Illustrator, Photoshop, Proto.io, Survey Monkey

Understand
&
Empathize

The first step in our process was to get the know the app itself. We started off doing our own heuristic evaluation then proceeded to user interviews and user testing to uncover any pain points.

Heuristic Evaluation

User Interviews / User Testing
We interviewed current users of the app to figure out how they use the app, what their favorite features are, and what they think could use improvement. In addition, we did specific task testing on brand new users to get a feel for how they interact with Trending Dish.

Synthesis
We plotted our findings on flow chart to see which screens presented the most pain points.

Key Findings

Efficiency

Important features are hard to find.
Adding a new dish is a slow process, especially when adding multiple dish reviews at one time.

Simplicity

Some screens are very similar and could be combined.
Some features of the app do very little to help its functionality.

Validation

User interviewing revealed that users wanted some sort of dish review validation.

IdeatE

Problem Statements

How might we increase discoverability of important features?

How might we simplify the flow for adding a new dish?

In what ways might we change the app architecture to create a more efficient platform for viewing dishes?

Create

Trim The Fat
By combining two screens and removing another outright, we were able to create a simplified app that achieves its intended purpose with greater efficiency.

Do More On One Screen

Search was placed in the nav bar so that it is accessible at all times given how useful it is.

A Menu button was created to house preferences and settings.

Sort options resulted from the combination of the “Trending” and “Find” screens. This allows the user to sort the dishes presented in a different order based off their preference.

The TOOL BAR went from five options to three. We moved the “Add Dish” the center of the tool bar because it is the main purpose of Trending Dish.

The DISH CARD includes all the dish details in one spot giving it the transparency we were looking for. We also included some review validation features such as average rating, other user's reviews of the same dish, and the number of saves the dish received.

Adding Multiple Dishes... No Problem

Adding a dish review is the main purpose of Trending Dish, so we needed to make sure the user flow was seamless.

To help accomplish this we: