In April of 2021, my two partners Aiden Yoo and Emma Johnston and I participated in a 24 hour design competition hosted by Innovative Design at USC called CreateSC. The goal was to create a an application that created a sense of community in a time where we have to stay social distanced due to the pandemic. Our team, BeeHive, decided to create the app Chow!, a phone app that encourages users to order food in video chats together, attempting to recreate the restaurant experience.
We were finalists who got to present our project to the panel of judges, and were
ultimately awarded 1st Place.
Role: Product Designer
Skills: Wireframing, Interaction, Prototyping
Team: Emma Johnston and Aiden Yoo
Timeline: April 2021 (24 Hour Design Challenge)
Tools: AdobeXD, Procreate
Product
Designer
Wireframing
Interaction
Prototyping
Emma Jonston
Aiden Yoo
April 2021
(24 Hour Design
Challenge)
AdobeXD
Procreate
THE PROJECT
With Chow!, users can discover new local restaurants or order their old favorites. To place an order, join a room and start chatting with friends, new or old. Users can join public “open” rooms, create private rooms, plan events for later, join Community Tables at restaurants, and even attend public events hosted by restaurants themselves! And when you know where you want to eat, you can place your order right in the app without ever leaving your room.
PROTOTYPE
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01 / INVITE
CREATE YOUR EVENT
Invite your friends to join you for your meal. Find your friends from other social media platforms, send them requests, and create your own video chat where you can interact, play games, and hang out together.
02 / ORDER
SIMULTANEOUS ORDERS
Order together from the app. Explore different restaurants and suggestions, and do all of your ordering at the same time. The orders will be synced and sent out to the restaurant at the same time to ensure a timely delivery to each home.
03/ FEAST
EAT TOGETHER
Receive your food and eat together with your friends. Not only are you helping a local restaurant, you are recreating the experience of being at a restaurant with your friends while keeping with social distance regulations and covid restrictions.
01 / PROBLEM
A report from the National Restaurant Association found that the restaurant industry made $240 million less in sales than projected before the pandemic. A recently published article in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology found that rates of depression in 2021 were 22% higher than in 2017.
The National Restaurant Association also found that although ordering takeout has become commonplace, people still crave a real restaurant experience. We also know that sharing a meal is a great way to build relationships—in a 2017 interview, social psychologist Shankar Vedantam discussed his findings that “People just feel closer to people who are eating the same food as they are.”
02 / RESEARCH
Our target audience was young adults ages 18-35 and small business owners. We created these user personas to guide our design process. Click on them!
Mark is a shy person, and loved going to the bar with his friends, because they would get him out of his comfort zone and he’d be able to meet new people. Due to the pandemic, he’s had to spend all of his time alone at home.
Mark appreciates how easy Chow makes it to meet new people casually and safely. He loves ordering from Public School Bar, and hanging out with some great people he would not have met otherwise.
Before the pandemic, Andrea and her best friend Emily would go to Brunch every first month at their favorite spot, Zinc. Due to the pandemic, this tradition hasn’t continued and Andrea finds herself losing contact with Emily.
Andrea loves Chow! because it helps her organize her Brunch dates with Emily, and helps her feel like they are close together even if they can’t see each other. They are now able to catch up every month.
Mike owns a small café in South Central LA. Before the pandemic, many students woud come and study there, or simply just hang out with friends. Due the pandemic, he does not have as many customers.
Mike is thankful for Chow! because more people are ordering pastries and meals from his café. Many students found his café through Chow! and despite the pandemic, it's always busy.
To learn more about the current design systems and user flows of food delivery apps, our team researched some of the most popular food apps on the market.
We also included other apps which features we admired, to create a truly unique application that does more than just order food.
We wanted to incorporate Yelp’s rating system to help user choose where to eat and to establish consumer trust. We also liked their user profile format, which didn’t involve follower count.
We focused on emphasizing more experiences. Instead of being a simple restaurant locating app, we wanted to encourage events.
We looked to UberEats as an example of an intuitive food delivery platform to inspire our food delivery interface. We admired the simplicity and the intuitivety of the product.
We wanted to make Chow! more than a delivery app. We also wanted to incorporate a popular rating system (Yelp) to build trust.
Houseparty has a great video chatting interface, and we loved their inclusion of features like in-app games. The interface is also very simple and intuitive, and it's easy to invite friends.
We wanted to make eating the core our experience and combine the casual experience of Houseparty with something like Yelp
03 / IDEATION
How might we re-create the social benefits of eating at a restaurant through a digital platform?
After completing our research, we got to work on wireframing. We decided on some pages we wanted such as a personal profile, a calendar, a restaurant page, a sign in, and a search page. Based on those pages, we each branched out of different features. We experimented with ideas like a Yelp-style restaurant page with popular dishes, reviews, and other recs, and even pairing users together based on food and dietary preferences!
Throughout the process, we kept coming back to our “How might we?” question to hone in on our design. We ultimately realized that we were trying to do too many things at once, and we cut down on some of our concepts. We wanted to make sure that every part of the app had a clear purpose.
The main goal for our mid-fidelity wireframes was to digitize the ideas we made in the low-fidelity ones. We split the work up and each worked on a bare-bones wireframe.
A big difference in our mid-fidelity wireframes was the restaurant page. In the original wireframes, we were picturing a more comprehensive page filled with information. We then decided that it was too much, and didn't necessarily add to the app experience. We ultimately ended up on a simpler design that focused simply on the menu, and made it simple and effective to order intuitively.
We also decided on what our main features were going to be. On our menu, we decided to place a home page, a search page, a start video chat function, notifications, and messages.
After finishing our mid-fidelity wireframes, we finally had a focused plan of what we wanted our app to be like.
04/ BRANDING
05/ SOLUTION
With Chow!, users can discover new local restaurants or order their old favorites. To place an order, join a room and start chatting with friends, new or old. Users can join public “open” rooms, create private rooms, plan events for later, join Community Tables at restaurants, and even attend public events hosted by restaurants themselves! And when you know where you want to eat, you can place your order right in the app without ever leaving your room.
PROTOTYPE06 / REFLECTION
Creating an app in only 24 hours really helped me boil down the most important parts of product design. The short time make us effectively split workload between the three of us, and focus on the most important parts of the design. We did not have time to overthink which made each decision simpler and easier to make.
When we first started on Chow!, we had so many ideas. We wanted to have a video chat aspect, a review and rate aspect, a matching up users aspect, and more. It was too much. So we went back to the reason we wanted to create this product, which helped us to strengthen our existing features.
I think the main reason we won was being of how strong our concept was. We decided to tackle an issue that was very timely, but also something that legitimately needed a solution. There were many food related apps presented in the finals, but we were the only ones focused on the restaurant experience. Our prototype was also very detailed and utilized the animation features in an effective way.
Either way, I am incredibly proud of my team and what we were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
When we presented our project to the judges, they told us how much they loved the ideas and the prototyping, but they still had one big question for us: are there too many features? Although a big part of our work for this project was simplifying our project, I do agree that it might have been simplified more.
The judges were confused by the inclusion of the notifications and the profile, and asked what we thought our key feature was. We answered easily: The video chat function, and the ordering function.
Although I think the notifications, the profile, and the messages were all very helpful for our product, there might have been a simpler way to incorporate them.
A big part of creating a product is the user testing aspect of it. However, in 24 hours, we unfortunately did not have the time to test the app with users, and gather some of their feedback. If I were to continue with this app, I would love to get some user research to make the app more intuitive.
It was a really exciting moment for all of us. We were slightly delusional from staying up for 24 hours straight, and my hands were starting to look green due to all of the red I was looking at.
