PlateRate

PlateRate helps users find the best foods and drinks to fit their dietary needs.


CHALLENGE: People with dietary restrictions or food allergies suffer when ordering food; existing products in the market don’t exactly offer a solution to the problem they face. The challenge is to create a better experience that helps people with dietary needs find curated places they can order from.

SOLUTION: I redesigned a strong branded mobile version integrating partner restaurants’ offers, a salient feature from the user research insights. See the prototype: CLICK HERE

Role: Freelance Research | UX/UI Designer

Goal

  • To remain competitive, PlateRate needs to raise its user base at least 15% by the end of this year providing users with a better user experience.

Contribution

  • Research, design, document and deliver sitemaps, user flows and interactive prototypes.
  • Collaborate defining requirements with project manager, founder, Q&A Teams, back–end developers.
  • Provide additional support outside the scope of the UX/UI through image editing, image retouching and art direction.
  • Team: Garrett Lang (Founder), Kevin McNamara (PM), Elizabeth Naughton (D)

Impact

  • Improved the overall user experience using stronger visual language, color, photography, and typography.
  • Tests are showing an increase in user engagement by 15% and validating the relevance of our partner’s offers for PlateRate’s users.

DISCOVERY

RESEARCH: I started surveying our existing user base to get a better grasp of my target audience. I needed to establish a general hypothesis around them.

SURVEYS AND INTERVIEWS: I surveyed more than 50 people and interview 6 end users. Questions were broken down into five categories:

  • • User Overview
  • • User Needs that Platerate could alleviate
  • • Are they confortable with what they are paying
  • • What is the most important thing for the users when ordering food
  • • User satisfaction using existing apps/features they like
INSIGHTS:
  • • 66% of our users would like to have help
 picking food to match their diets
  • • 65% of people think they spend too
 much money ordering food
  • • 67% highlighted the importance of an
 easy to use app and good service

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS: I wanted to understand how both direct and indirect brands within the same space were presenting similar content on their apps. I could identify GrubHub/Seamless, Uber Eats and Yelp as direct competitors; they also have rating systems and restaurant information on meals and indications on food without allergens.

ANALYZE AND BRAINSTORM

USER STORIES: Identify high priority user tasks by asking:

  • • How helpful would it be for you to get assitance picking food you can eat? Feel safe ordering
  • • How much money are you spending on ordering out? Saving money
  • • How important would it be for you that is easy to use
 and looks good? Easy to use/Appetizing

Analyzing the competitors re–afirm why PlateRate needed to exist, none of them can provide the specialized service PlateRate does. The diet Match and special restaurant offers can serve as the app key differentiators. I identified the user’s needs for savings so one of the layouts visualize the restaurant’s offers as the main feature. The next important feature would be to provide information on how the meals matched the user special diet and the visual enhancement with better photography, and typography.

PERSONAS: Based on my research and project goals I synthesize the findings into 3 key personas. They reflect groups of users who have special dietary needs, health conscious (no pesticides) or a health condition.

FEATURES IMPACT AND EXPECTATIONS MATRIX: Based on my user stories I developed a matrix with an emphasis on user impact and user expectations. Surprisingly from the research, the rating system was not of interest to the users as it was the diet match and the savings when eating out.

USER FLOW: I created a user flows to map out the ways users could order a meal for delivery. The top is a rough and the bottom diagram is a corrected representation of the direct and indirect pathways a user would take to complete their task. These flows are the artifacts I share with developers so we both have an idea of what we are building.

IDEATE

WIREFRAMES: With a sequence of wireframes, I laid out the the processes for ordering a meal with the app, searching for a meal as a user and non–user.

PAPER PROTOTYPE: Before commiting to a high definition prototype I outlined quickly the functions in a paper prototype to get feedback on early designs and test the personal diet match and restaurant discounts with potential users.
PROTOTYPE: I was now able to create a functional prototype using Sketch and InVision to test on actual users. My goal was to determine if my design is intuitive and easy to use – are the expectations of the user achievable based on my current design? For the high fidelity prototype CLICK HERE

Below you can see the value proposition for the desktop version.

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