LunchWalk
How might we find new solutions for an old problem: What’s for lunch?
Key Skills: INTERACTION DESIGN; RESEARCH; STRATEGY
It’s an everyday problem—literally. People have to eat lunch, and no matter how well they meal plan for the week, sometimes they don’t have time to bring their lunch or don’t want to. So they get out of the office (or house, or school) and search for something to eat.
How can we make that task easier? And how do we come up with a solution in an already crowded market?
My Role: The researcher and designer
Research & Synthesis
How do people plan for lunch? What leads to them wandering for food?
Methods:
I interviewed 8 people who worked 9-5 jobs in downtown Chicago and Schaumburg, IL.
I had one user document their process of choosing where to eat lunch for three days.
Secondary research of existing food and map apps.
How often did they go out to eat lunch and how did they decide what to eat?
People have several, varied reasons for their lunch decisions.
Almost all noted that they did not and would not travel far to get lunch. And most people went to places within a short walking distance and went alone.
-Some people used their lunch as a mental and environmental break for their job.
-Some people enjoyed the walk they had at lunchtime.
-Some people wanted to eat at their favorite places.
-Some people wanted to try new restaurants.
-Some people wanted to only eat healthy foods at lunch.
-Some people meal prepped and ate lunch as a restaurant as a treat.
-Some people ate lunch at a restaurant several times a week.
-People used apps to look up restaurant menus and locations, but they didn’t use them to find places to eat when lunchtime actually came.
There were a lot of different motivations and needs when people talked about their lunch habits and preferences…
Affinity Map of Lunch Research
…which just led to more questions:
Is going out for lunch just a reason to go outside and walk?
Is going to recommended places a reason to connect with friends even as we eat alone?
Is going out to eat a necessity because of poor meal planning?
The answer? Not Really.
When it comes to food, people want what they want even when they don’t know what they want yet.
Plus, being surrounded by high-quality places, people wanted to participate in the local food scene.
The question really was: How might we connect people to the food they want more efficiently?
Ideation & Strategy
Crazy 8s
I had to keep in mind that users wanted an easy and efficient way to find food that they liked.
Since everyone I interviewed mentioned looking up menus—whether physically posted on doors or on a website or app—before deciding to eat somewhere, I made that the centerpiece of the solution.
I chose the solution where users sorted through menus of nearby places to decide what and where to eat. It was the solution that was the easiest to use and gave users the freedom to personalize their choices for lunch.
Concept Testing
I tested my idea of the app with 4 users, who quickly pointed out a fatal flaw of the design: it was an app.
My research already showed me that users don’t want to use an app when lunchtime comes to search for something to eat. It took too much time to sort through menus and it didn’t differentiate between people saying no to a restaurant because they never wanted to eat there and people saying no because they didn’t want to eat there at that moment.
“I don’t want to do research at lunch.”
Besides, there was already a crowded market for lunch apps—Google Maps, Yelp, Grubhub, and many others. I was just reinventing the wheel.
Going back to my research, I realized a major problem the other apps didn’t address. Users could search for restaurants and even save them, but they didn’t really interact with those saved restaurants afterwards.
Prototyping
I kept the “menu Tinder” as the centerpiece of the app because users liked it, but I changed when it would be used.
The flow map of the original prototype I created in Marvel. Used for usability testing.
An accessibility issue I’ve often come across is when forms have directions in the field that disappear when the user taps on the field. I made the sign up form more accessible by putting directions above the field instead of in it.
I took into account cultural dietary restrictions and not just health-related ones.
I created a logo and chose brand colors.
Moving forward: I’m working to develop this app, and will do more user testing to refine it.