Creating a Minimum Viable Product
for Food Ordering Website
Identifying the Problem
This process started with generative research.
I conducted three Directed Storytelling interviews, all starting with the prompt “Tell me a story about a time when you ordered food or groceries for pickup or delivery?”
All the participants had very different stories to tell - one who orders the same UberEats order every week, another who gets dinners for the week delivered every Monday, and another who only really uses apps to order pizzas for pickup at a local restaurant. Despite their differences, I was able to synthesize what I learned and find enough similarities in their needs and wants to generate a user goal statement.
Understanding the Users
The key similarities between the participants in my interviews were:
They all lived in 2 person households
Those that ordered from restaurants emphasized that they avoided delivery on food apps because of the high fees and issues that can arise from deliveries.
All of them also enjoyed supporting local businesses and trusted the restaurants more than third party apps
Considering all of this, my user goal statement was:
My user group is those in small households who want to find a consistent, transparent, and personal meal ordering website that allows customers to pick up food from local restaurants and get their service experience mainly from the restaurant rather than a third party, so they can feel connected to other people and confident they’re getting a high-quality product.
Ideation
After synthesizing my goal, I started on a prototype. I started out with very low fidelity prototypes that I sketched on paper to get an idea of what I wanted to build out.
With those in hand, I dove headfirst into learning how Figma worked, starting with laying things out on top of my sketched wireframes, but also adding new pages as ideas occurred, and trying to follow the same design ideas throughout. I got a rough structure setup first, before going back through and adding stylistic choices and placeholder photos.
Once I had a higher fidelity layout, I added in the interactions between pages, and added a few components to give basic functionality to key pages so I could perform Usability Tests.
Prototype I used for testing:
I then conducted three Think-Aloud Evaluation Usability Tests to test how well users were able to figure out the site, and assess whether there were any major gaps or blockers keeping them from performing actions on the site. I watched and listened as they went through the process of searching for a restaurant, learning about the restaurant, adding and removing items from their cart, and placing their order.
I then used what I learned to synthesize a Findings Report, which was very insightful in pointing out a lot of things that I had overlooked or just assumed were obvious. My participants were also very helpful in identifying features that could be added to make the site even better and more functional for users.
Evaluation and Iteration
What I Learned and Next Steps
This entire process was a huge learning experience, and getting to do every step from start to finish allowed me to try on a lot of hats.
None of the steps were done perfectly, but improvements were made with each iteration, and the feedback I got was invaluable.
The goal for this project was just to create a Minimum Viable Product, but if I were to keep iterating on this, I would make all the changes I found in my findings report and maybe build out some of the features that users wanted. And then the process would continue with more testing, and eventually maybe get built.
Prototype with changes made from input gained during Usability Tests