Jonathan Puc
Research, Product design, Illustration and Motion.
Personal Project
The Brief
Validate, test and improve the way a community meet, share and experience some of the greatest foods in their city.
The Result
Zestly is an app that brings like-minded people living a vegan and vegetarian lifestyles together. It is a place to meet new people, enjoy great food and share their experiences.
With an abundance of apps making it easier to date, travel and eat we felt something was missing and although all of these apps and services are enjoyable and help us achieve what we set out to do – we asked ourselves, how can we make the ease of eating more meaningful?
The idea was simple: bring people together to share and experience a meal together. And with that, we spoke to an audience often overlooked to validate our idea. We spoke to people living vegan and vegetarian lifestyles that validated the want to experience highly recommended restaurants with a great menu and share that with friends, new and old.
With a validated concept we also pushed further to understand how we could design an experience they trust and want to use.
Although we initially used surveys to scope possibilities. We organised interviews with people aged between 18 to 25 for a greater understanding of their behaviour with online services such as Tinder, Bumble and Meetups.
These personal conversations with 10 participants accompanied with over 600 responses across two surveys gave us a great understanding of our users. With a large amount of data to sort, I worked with Jonathan to affinity map the interviews, documented final insights and began discussing how to tackling the biggest opportunities. Once we had done this we began doing wireframes of key flows.
The home page was designed for the personas that were identified through our interviews. These types are categorised as; The unorganised, the organiser and the organised. With these users identified, I designed sections to help these users based on their style of use.
Early wireframes of referencing identified user personas.
Higher fidelity exploration of the home page referencing user persona insights.
The insights and ideas continued into the first high fidelity screen with a few minor changes to simplify to focus on key product interactions and motivations of the three users.
The Home of feasts was structured with the
three main user categorise in mind:
Feasts happening today
Restaurant recommendation
Popular feasts happening this week
Like hosting feasts? easy. Search by cuisine, restaurant name or location to get started; Select your restaurant, day and time.
Your personal profile is tucked away behind a hub style interface. We decided to go with the profile hub interface because it allows for space to access profile settings, edit profile as well as room for “profile tips & tricks” cards. These cards are displayed with information as a result of our interviews and if taken into consideration by the user, their Zeslty experience will be far more positive.
Placing constraints on the content in your profile was a consideration that goes much deeper than design aesthetic. From our research, we found that people are more likely to meet you if you have shorter and more creative content about yourself on your profile. This same insight also goes for your profile pictures and Instagram connection. Your chances of getting people to meet increase with 3 or more photos and get much more likely if you have a connected Instagram account which is something our participants would use to prove you’re a real person.
Profile edit screen.
Profile view screen.
Although the interviews and surveys were insightful and helped guide the design decisions the whole way through the project. There are a few things that I want to reconsider in future projects.
Interviews
– In future opportunities, the respondents of the interviews should be a little more hyper focused.
– For this project, we targeted a broader audience and weren’t entirely prepared for what we were faced with in regards to interview guidelines
Surveys
I learnt the importance of piloting a survey with a small sample of participants so that:
– I get feedback on ambiguous questions and/or answers.
– Have the chance to edit the questions without skewing end results
– And perfect the way that the survey is introduced so that people don’t misinterpret the requirements of the survey.
Login flow and it's timing
On review of this project, I have now began to question the effectiveness of the login flow. With further research into this I would like redesign the login flow and its timing by applying and testing the Fogg Behaviour Model. I believe if tested, the users might be more incline to explore the app and learn about the value it provides before committing.