01. Background

Competition is rising in the food delivery industry and something is bottleneck for survival.

In this competitive market, we need a specialized experience to stand out.

1. App Experience: Growth of the Premium Food Delivery Market

Premium food delivery services are emerging and their market is growing. They provide foods made by their internal chef or from high-end restaurants. This means that demand for more expensive but higher quality foods is growing as time goes by.

2. Restaurant Experience: Chef's Personalized Recommendation, Jiro's Sushi Bar.

Jiro's sushi bar is one of the best selling sushi restaurant in Japan. Their service experience is unique compared to other sushi bars.  As the philosophy of this restaurant is based on personal interactions, chef knows each and every customer and based on their tastes, the chef recommends specials of the day.

04. Proposed Solution

How it works

User Interface

1. Getting Started

At the beginning, users are asked to choose their preference on foods, allergy information, and the chefs they want to follow. Once this process is done, users will get feeds from chefs they follow.

2. Browsing and Ordering Food

Users can browse foods that chefs recommend and order the food with one click.

3. Chef's profile

If users click the chef's photo on the main page, they can view that chef's profile. They can see other posts that chefs have uploaded so far. Also, this page includes how many followers the chef has, how many posts he’s uploaded, and so on. 

UI Screens

Design Process

The result of the product was not made at once. I kept iterating an idea, its design, user flow, and prototypes until I found the best solution.

1. Brainstorming

At first, I had two ideas for the main page of "Chef's choice". Plan A was a vertical feed where users can browse options by scrolling up and down. Plan B was a horizontal feed where users can see feeds by flicking left and right. 

2. User Testing

To arrive to the best solution, I implemented user testing with people who use food delivery service apps. I picked people who live in urban areas(major user group of these services) and who had experience of ordering food through mobile apps. From this activity, I found that users wanted plan A more since they can view more feeds at a time. So I decided to go with Plan A.

3. Design Style Guide

In this app, the most important element is food and restaurant. So I tried to use font and color as simple as possible so that users can fully focus on food and restaurants. For fonts, I used San-Serif font to make the design simple and minimal instead of using fancy fonts.

4. Prototyping

Lastly, I made a prototype animation using the Principle App. It's useful when I need to describe how UI works.

Thoughts

"Chef's choice saves so much time for searching restaurants and foods."

- Sara B / Seamless user

"When I want to explore a new menu, I always get recommendations from my friends. This new experience will do a perfect job at that."

- Young K / Eat24 User

Yelp design challenge was interesting to me since I could practice what I’ve learned from my school and my career as a UX/UI designer. Throughout the entire experience of this activity, I thoroughly enjoyed it. One good thing about this challenge was that I had a freedom to pick an interest area that I am passionate about and go with it. Since I love using food delivery services, I chose the topic of the deliver app. I hope the result from this activity helps Yelp's Eat24 provide a better user experience to its customers.

Thank you!