Fleat
Food trucks curated for all, you gourmet foodies!
My role
The project is a two-month design sprint conducted for my UXII course. I worked in a team of two for the initial part of the project. After the research phase, we were collaborated by two more members. Later, I worked solely on creating the high-fidelity prototype.
Tools
Pen & Paper, Jamboard, Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator
The problem
People love the authenticity of food trucks but finding a food truck and ordering food there can become rather inconvenient. There are a few existing "food truck finders" apps out there, but they only have a couple of trucks on them, and that too with limited functionality.
The goal
Creating a digital platform where people can find all the relevant information on the nearby food trucks. It gives detailed information like the type of cuisine, detailed ingredient listing, truck's whereabouts, recommendations, past purchase history, etc. The idea is to create an intuitive and easy interface that is easy to use, provides a fun experience, and strengthens the community of food truck lovers.
Empathize and Research
User surveys, User Interviews, Comparative Analysis
Understanding user motivations and pain points through user surveys
From our user research, we realized that most people eat at the food trucks during lunchtime(mostly) or late in the night. We selected the office goers as the focus group and surveyed thirteen of them. We started by asking:
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How frequently do people eat out at lunch?
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If they currently use a satisfactory food truck app?
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If yes, What features do they use in the food truck app?
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How far they’d travel for a food truck
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How interested they are in using a food truck app?
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Why do they eat at trucks?
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How do they pay?
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What are their biggest pain points?
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What do they feel that could be done differently?
90% users have eaten food from food truck in lunch
95% users feel that food truck queues are too long
80% users want to know the truck whereabouts from before.
60% users want to ingredient listing of menu items.
50% users have made mobile payments for buying food from food trucks.
5% users browse the menu before visiting the trucks
"There are food truck apps but they do not have a lot of trucks and limited functionality. I need to use FB,IG or websites to find what I am looking for."
"Food trucks are great when I want something different and quick but don't want to go to a crowded restaurant."
User Interviews
Though the surveys gave us a high-level understanding, we still needed to fill some of the gaps. For e.g. if 5% of users browse the menu before visiting the food truck, is it because the menu is not available easily? Do they use any food truck app? Would they be interested in the digital menu if it was available easily?
We interviewed five people within our focus group of office-goers and pulled some valuable insights on their motivations, preferences, and pain points.
Comparative Analysis
We started studying the features of the existing apps for restaurants as well as food trucks. Food truck apps like Best Food Trucks, Street Food Finder, Truckster, etc. were doing well in the market. However, it was also interesting to see the constantly growing restaurant apps like Grubhub, DoorDash, etc. We leveraged this study further in the design stage when we started sketching our user flow and must-have features based on that.
Define
Empathy Map, Persona Development, Customer Journey Map
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Research Analysis
Based on our user research, we summarized everything to create an empathy map for the busy office workers. The idea was to pull some insights on the 'pains' and 'gains' of the user.
What do they THINK & FEEL?
Pains
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Long queue
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Some food trucks offer cash payments only.
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Need ingredients list to know more about the allergens.
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Food truck requires longer preparation time.
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" Half of the ingredients were already over till it was my time to order."
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" I missed my food truck by five minutes."
Gains
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Focuses on specialty food options.
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Variety and multiple options for food choices are available apart from the nearby restaurants.
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"Love the poke bowl food truck!"
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Portion size and food quality are good enough for a heavy lunch meal.
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Very easily accessible from the office.
Persona Development
In order to understand our office-goers better, we made persona based on our user research.
Customer Journey Map
Our other challenge was to understand and break the user flow into tasks and to identify opportunities to engage the user in every stage. E.g. what can a user do while waiting for an order? Perhaps you have an option to play a game while waiting! The goal was to create an overall immersive experience from browsing through the food options to post-checkout.
Ideate
How Might We, Hypothesis, Brainstorming sessions
How Might We?
Our user research guided us into a collaborative HMW session. Our intent was to turn the key challenges identified in the research stage into opportunities for design.
How might we collaborations in FigJam
Hypothesis
The food trucks have always symbolized convenience and fast service. However, where restaurants have transformed themselves in the digital age with services offered by UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates, etc., food trucks have been lagging far behind.
Food trucks need to embrace this changing consumer behavior and at the same time retain their authenticity. An intuitive and easy interface that is easy to use, provides a fun experience and strengthens the community of food truck lovers can help in achieving that goal.
Brainstorming
Our HMW questions helped us in generating various ideas that could help in solving some of the user problems.
Brainstorming Ideas
Design
User Flow, Logo Design, Design Library, High fidelity Mockups
Visualizing the user flow through brainstorming and co-creative workshops
We started brainstorming to generate ideas, features, and user flow based on our HMW questions and earlier brainstorming sessions.
The idea was to create a seamless process where actions/features should be introduced as per the natural flow of a user’s behavior. We created one direct flow and the other as a bit more feature-rich flow, both up to the user to decide which one to take.
Apart from this, we gave many features optional for the users to use which could help them in a higher user engagement.
Brainwriting and brainstorming
Logo Ideation
We wanted to come up with a simple and minimalist logo that also could highlight the vibrancy and fun side of the food trucks as well as their authenticity.
Logo Ideation
Design Library
We wanted to showcase the exclusivity of the food trucks and set them apart from food delivery apps. We brainstormed on the design library to come up with a theme that would reflect a food app(using colors like red, orange, etc.) but would also maintain the truck’s uniqueness(different shades of orange and red, through iconography, fonts, etc.).
Color Scheme Ideation
Design Library
High Fidelity Prototype
Here, I have only included the screens personally designed by me.
Test
Usability Testing
I tested my prototype on eight people. Two of them were food-truck enthusiasts.
Below are the major feedback received.
What worked?
"I love how simple and clean the design is. It is easy to follow."
What needs improvement?
"The home page is very visually appealing. It is informationally dense but clear at the same time.
"Being a food truck enthusiast, I love how clean and vibrant the app is. It contains all the relevant info"
"I love how intuitive the app is. Many good filtering and sorting options.
" The platform may be a good opportunity to strengthen the community of food trucks enthusiasts."
Learnings
What I learned
I learned how to work in a collaborative set up with people who were from non-design fields and to have an enriching conversation. It was interesting to learn together the design tools which could help us communicate with each other in a better way and guide us to come up with the right design solutions. That was the biggest learning curve for me.
What's next!
Food trucks enthusiasts have such a deep passion for different kinds of food trucks and I feel it is important to address and strengthen their community. I would probably want to take this project further in that direction.
