Starting with the Discovery phase of the project I immersed myself in the world of eating restrictions and intolerances. It was a lot more complicated that I had expected. As well as common eating preferences like vegan and vegetarian, there are also food intolerances, diets for medical reasons and allergies to foods like nuts and fish to name a few. To keep the project manageable I chose to focus the most common eating requirements/restrictions. With those in mind I did a competitive comparison, confirming my assumption that there was very little consideration given to eating requirements when ordering online. From there I defined my research goals and a set of draft questions to use for my user research.

Research goals

• Gain a broad understanding of the different types of dietary needs, (restrictions vs. preferences vs, allergies etc.) and the impact these have on people’s food choices and interactions with food.
• Identify the current challenges facing people with special dietary requirements when ordering takeaways online.
• Determine if there is a want from the dietary requirement community for a online takeaway ordering service catering to their needs.
• Use findings to explore solutions to the current limitations

Research questions

• What are your dietary requirements, restrictions, preferences?
• How do these requirements, restrictions, preferences a ect your approach to eating, preparing, buying food? What special arrangements (if any) do you need to make when eating/preparing/buying food?
• Can you recall a situation where your requirements, restrictions, preferences have caused you difficulty or inconvenience?
• How often to you order food from takeaway restaurants? Where from and why from that particular restaurant?
• If it was easier to order appropriate food online, would you order more often?
• If you do not prepare food for yourself, where do you get your food from and why?

My user research took the form of online surveys, Skype interviews and face to face interviews. I refined my questions as the series of interviews progressed, dropping those that were leading to less relevant information and adding new questions based of the success of previous answers and discussions.

The low-fidelity sketches proved that the overall flow was working but that I needed to included a deeper level of detail to test the wording and functions within the app. On my mid fidelity prototype I shifted to visualising on an iPad after making the decision to design my app as a responsive website rather than a mobile app. I visualised a combined signup/on-boarding and the restaurant menu page where a lot of the pain points were addressed and tested. A clickable prototype was created using Sketch wireframes and Marvel.

The low-fidelity sketches proved that the overall flow was working but that I needed to included a deeper level of detail to test the wording and functions within the app. On my mid fidelity prototype I shifted to visualising on an iPad after making the decision to design my app as a responsive website rather than a mobile app. I visualised a combined signup/on-boarding and the restaurant menu page where a lot of the pain points were addressed and tested. A clickable prototype was created using Sketch wireframes and Marvel.

I have highlighted two usability improvements here that came out of my user testing. The first is the add to cart function. There was confusion in almost every test between the ‘finished customising’ button and then having to add that to the cart. I reworked this process so the dish is added straight to the cart when the done button is clicked. Testing proved this to be a big improvement over the previous prototype. The second improvement was again to do with the “users personalised menu” and “restaurants standard menu” function. There was still some uncertainty here about the difference between the two menus. To address this issue I added a ‘loading’ style pop up to remind the user that the app is actually filtering and personalising the restaurant menus to suit their profile. Testing proved this to be an improvement in the users understanding of the two menus.