Lunch Sharing
Overview
BENTO is a platform for people who love home-cooked food and want to maintain a varied healthy diet alongside their active lives.
There are two features of the BENTO application:
Community: where you may organize in groups of two to five people who cook once a week.
Market: where you can purchase and sell meals from talented chefs around you.
For this project, I concentrated on the student community as a target market.
Project Duration: March - July 2020
Design Process
Defining The Problem
Characterization of personas
Users Research
User Flow & App Architecture
Market Research
Design System
The Solution
Prototype & Scenarios
Defining the Problem
Most students come to educational institutions at least 5 days a week. For most, these are the first years out of their parents' home, and they are very busy juggling educational assignments, social life and sometimes also work.
It therefor happens that nutrition is pushed to the bottom of the list of priorities and students find themselves eating food they wouldn't want to eat or spending a lot of money in cafeteria, restaurants and food deliveries.
Users Research
Due to the Corona virus, I had to give up on in-depth face-to-face interviews, and instead settled for a survey distributed among HIT students. The survey aimed at examining their dietary habits, their pain points and opportunities.
Insights:
Opportunity:
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Lunch is the main meal during the Student Day
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Most of them (60%) prefers home cooked food
Pain Point:
“We (57%) want to keep a healthy diet, it doesn't always work for us”
Cooking means shopping and spending time and energy in the kitchen.
Opportunity:
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Half of the surveyed cook for themselves every day.
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The other half would like to, but they have no time for that
Market Research
As part of my study, I searched for food sharing apps to analyze their UX / UI strategy so I could learn from them, as well as differentiate my product. The "Why?" Of each of the apps I chose is very different, and yet each one inspired me in one way or another.
OLIO
Share more. Waste less.
"We connect neighbours with each other and Food Waste Hero volunteers with local businesses, to share food (and other things) rather than chuck them away. Sharing is fast, free and friendly!"
Eatwith
Discovery begins at home
" We connect people who are seeking unique and immersive experiences with our hand-selected local hosts, in private homes and exclusive venues."
Through market research, it became clear to me which services I would like to offer in the app and how I would like to arrange the functions:
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All foods available in the app will be cooked at home and in small amounts.
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The user's movement in the application will start with the search using the three filters: dates, diet style and location
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The innovative service the application will provide will be social and sharing-based.
The Solution
In the app I built, I offer two different services:
Community
Bento specializes in connecting people with meal groups depending on location, diet style and dates. The idea is simple: each group member prepares a meal once a week for the whole group
Marketplace
Another service that the app will provide is market - where anybody can buy and sell a home-cooked meal from one of the talented cooks around.
In order to characterize and design the screens according to usage scenarios, I focused on community service because I believe it is the most innovative and interesting.
Personas
I created four relevant personalities for an academic ecosystem, in this case, HIT.
Service Flow Click to enlarge
Once you choose to attend a co-op meal there are two options: Join a group that has already opened and is seeking partners. Open a new group and share the news to encourage people to join.
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Information Architecture Click to zoom in
App Screens
Design system
For the design system, I chose the use of strong, but soft colors, plays an important role in the separation of the two main features of the application. Lunch groups were given green color and buy-sell, got yellow color. The color pink corresponds to the color of the system and the community.
The illustrations are intended to soften the pragmatism of the application and bring out the creativity of the food preparation.
Photos and cooking videos are at the heart of the application, where users can showcase their creativity. I convey the responsibility for all the content of the application to the users and I am certainly aware of the weakness of this decision.
Scenarios & Prototype:
For the prototype,I decided to focus on two main scenarios: the return user and the onboarding user.
The Onboarding Scenario
The Returning User Scenario
