Overview
For my Senior Project Portfolio Capstone class, my team of three others and I spent four months creating our mobile prototype, FARE, which is a app that allows couples and groups of friends reduce the time it takes and come to an agreement when deciding where to eat. With the use of a swipe system like Tinder's, couples or groups are able to find a match when it come to picking a restaurant. We also added a discover option that shows restaurants for individuals that would want to use the app as well. The method we used to create our final product is the Goal-Directed Design process by Alan Cooper. This process page with further explain the steps we took using this method.
Role: UX Designer/Researcher
Duration: 4 Months
Introduction
FARE was created in my Senior Project Portfolio Capstone course at Kennesaw State University. During our four months of working together on this project, we used tools such as Miro (white boarding tool), Discord (communication tool), and Figma (prototyping tool) to allow us to collaborate. My team and I achieved our final product by using the Goal-Directed Design method by Alan Cooper. Goal-Directed Design focuses on user behavior meeting user needs and goals. The steps to this process are: research, modeling, requirements, frameworks, and refinement.
Goal Directed Design
Research Phase
Research is a crucial part when wanting to develop something that meets users needs and goals. It allows us to find qualitative information about potential users for our product. During our research we held a ​kickoff meeting, did a literature review, competitive audit, and conducted four user interviews to better understanding of who we are designing for and the demands for the product. I will further go into explanation of each step of our research.
Research is a crucial part when wanting to develop something that meets users needs and goals. It allows us to find qualitative information about potential users for our product. During our research we held a ​kickoff meeting, did a literature review, competitive audit, and conducted four user interviews to better understanding of who we are designing for and the demands for the product. I will further go into explanation of each step of our research.
Kickoff Meeting
The Kickoff meeting is where we discussed the main elements of a products demand and get an understanding of how stakeholders envision their product, users, and goals. Since this is a school project, there were no actual stakeholders involved. My team and I utilized the tool Miro, a collaborative whiteboard where we can all share and edit our work, and held a virtual meeting via Discord to discuss.
During our meeting we discussed and came up with out problem statement, research question, and user goals:
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Problem Statement: People often have difficulty deciding where they should eat, especially in groups. This indecisiveness usually snowballs into confusion and wasted time. Currently, there are no well-known apps that people can use to decide where to eat. Our app could help users quickly and fairly make the decision while generating more business for restaurant chains
Research Question: What kinds of methods do social groups commonly use to agree on a decision?
User Goals:
• Quickly find places to eat
• Come to a decision with a group
• Discover restaurants that they would like
Literature Review
A literature review is where we needed to gather additional context about the product we are designing. This is where we find any documents or sources related to our products domain and design to help understand our problem statement and answer our research question.
We needed to understand what causes people to have trouble when deciding where they want to eat and what the deciding factors are when trying to come to an agreement with another person. We also wanted to integrate the swiping method as used on Tinder to allow users to swipe until they find a match on where to go with their partner. Here is what we learned:
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Restaurant Findings
• Important factors for determining a place to eat include mood/cravings, price, location, past experience, and service quality.
• Younger diners stick with known restaurants to lessen decisions.
• People tend to decide on a specific food before anything else.
Swipe Findings
• The more options something has, the more effort it takes to decide and the less satisfying the result is.
• Swiping is more effective when there is a visual appeal.
Competitive Audit
The competitive audit is another important step in the research phase because it teaches us about the strengths and weaknesses of other huge competitors related to our product. This helps us understand what we should implement into our app that other competitors fail to consider.
My team and I researched four different apps that are related to our design. Three our of the four apps we researched were food deciding apps and the other app was Tinder to better understand to negatives and positives of the swipe feature since that is what we wanted to integrate in our design.
We found that some apps display false information and advertising which misleads the users. There were also issues with the usability of certain app which was found to be confusing for some users. For the food apps the most complain issue we found was the layout of the apps. We kept tis common issue in mind when designing our prototype.
Competitive Audit Table
User Interviews
In order to get a better understanding of our potential user needs for our product, we had to conduct user interviews to observe how they behave and think. My team and I reached out to five different people asking for their consent by sending out a consent form for the chance to be able to interview them. Before we started the interviews, we all spent time meeting through the discord server to create an interview guide with a set of questions that we could build off of. The first set of questions were related to their issues of deciding where to eat, the second set of questions were related to their preferences, and the last set of questions were related to our product and what they would like to see and not see. We each took turns moderating each interview. While one person was the moderator, the rest of us would facilitate and take in-depth notes. Once the moderator reaches to the last question, the rest of us were given a chance to ask any other questions related or that we had thought of based on the feedback during the interview.
Common patterns we found:
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Eat out once or twice a week.​​
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​Don't out by themselves.​​
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Some prefer affordable dining options. ​​
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Some don't mind spending extra on fine dining.​​
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Spend almost 20 – 30 minutes deciding where to eat.
Affinity Mapping
After we completed our interviews, we completed an Affinity Map, which is a technique where designer separately create affinities (sticky notes) of what they observed, and then later come together and group the affinities which are similar.
My team and I used an affinity map for all five interviewees with us each using a different color sticky note and then meeting virtually via discord grouping the ones which are similar.
Conducting user interviews and creating an affinity map is a crucial part of Goal-Directed Design because it is what helps us understand our next step for this process: the modeling phase.
Modeling Phase
During the modeling phase in the Goal Directed Design process, designers create personas, which are characters based on the research phase. A persona is a powerful tool for interaction design because it provides a precise way of thinking and communicating about how users have, think, what they want to accomplish, and why. Personas help us understand how a user might interact with our app which allows us to move forward with the process.
​When crafting our personas we wanted to keep in mind of modeling them for two completely different kinds of users that would potentially use this product based on the research we had done and the feedback from our user interviews. Our primary persona is is Kevin Bell who is 42 years old, married, and a pilot at Frontier Airlines. Our secondary persona is Sarah Paige who is 23 years old, single, and is a barista at Starbucks. Our primary persona, Kevin, is obviously someone who is usually trying to decide where to eat with his wife. Our secondary persona, Sarah, is someone who is trying to decided where to eat with her friends.
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Requirements Phase
The requirements phase in the Goal-Directed Design process is where we create the requirements list based on the personas from the modeling phase and what information and capabilities are required to accomplish their goals. During this phase we also create a context scenario which is written from the personas perspective which allows the designer to imagine the ideal user experience.
My team and I created two whiteboards on Miro, one for the requirements list and the context scenario Our requirements list consists of primary and secondary requirements. The primary requirements are the most important requirements for our product based on the feed back we got through our user interviews and research. Our secondary requirements are requirements that we figured as a team would be beneficial to the product aside from the requirements we made through our research.
Requirements List
Context Scenario
Frameworks Phase
Wireframes
After finishing the requirements phase, my team and I created wireframes for our prototype based off of the context scenario and requirements list we made using our personas from the modeling phase. Creating a wireframe in the Goal Directed Design process are a highly effective way to discuss design solutions. After creating our low-fidelity wireframes screens we worked together to create the user flow of the screens using arrows. Creating a low-fidelity version of our product is crucial when designing for a user because it is important that we are meeting the requirements and it fits into their needs before jumping into the high-fidelity prototype.
Refinement Phase
Negative Takeaways
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Certain back buttons were non-functional.​
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The home button was initially confusing to a user.​
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​One participant disliked that the edit friends option was in the settings section.
Positive Takeaways
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Simplicity of the app​
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The group/friends feature is highly valued.​
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​The level of information on the restaurant tab is a big plus.​
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The refinement phase is where we iterate on our design based on the feedback we receive. We conducted a usability test of our low-fidelity prototype by sending out google forms to multiple participants asking them to complete six tasks within the prototype and to answer nineteen open ended questions.
Final Prototype
Based on the feedback we received on our usability test, we took it into consideration when creating our high-fidelity prototype. We had a meeting discussing possible color schemes, text, and a name for our product. We chose the name "Fare" because food = fare and we are trying to make the deciding choices between couple and groups fair which makes it a play on words. Since we all discussed on keeping the same style choices within the final prototype, my team and I split up screens to work on and created our final product.
Conclusion
Using the Goal-Directed Design method made it easier for my team and I to understand our user's goals and needs. We did face some challenges when trying to align our work and school schedules to meet and work on this project, but we were able to always make time one way or another to get each part of the process done. We were also able to divide up to work as a team so that one person didn't bare the load of everything. I would say the each of us pulled the weight we were given and were able to successfully complete this project within the given timeline.
What I learned throughout this process is to take time to really understand your users. Qualitative research is key when it comes to designing to meet the satisfaction of user needs and goals. Without taking time to do our in-depth research we wouldn't have been able to model, frame, and refine our product.