project name:
design intention:
PitchDeals
a B2C webapp that allows customers to pitch a desired discount deal for local restaurants nearby for a quick and convenient meal.
the challenge
Food waste is a huge problem everyday for the American restaurant industry. A study by the Food Waste Reduction Alliance found that 84.3% of unused food in American restaurants ends up being disposed of, while 14.3% is recycled, and only 1.4% is donated. Understanding this problem, the idea is to create a solution that helps restaurants sell their unsold food with a discounted price.
The first task was to identify the main cause of why restaurant owners throw away unsold yet feasible foods from their inventory. Previous research showed that the majority of restaurant owners didn’t know what to do with the food other than throw it away.
It was concluded that unsold foods from restaurants are being throw away due to unfulfilled sales targets. Also, the owners didn’t know how to promote their product successfully so they didn’t have food waste.
user research
As a beginning step to my process, I researched the competition of restaurant deals and did a competitive analysis. These three competitors, Groupon, livingsocial, and restaurant.com were looked at for their features, advantages, and disadvantages for the customer. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses that our team may face and make more informed decisions about product strategy.
user personas
Based on findings from the competitor research, I summarized a user persona for whom the product would be designed for, highlighting the specific needs, pain points, and motivations that needed to be addressed on the building the product features. Based on the user persona, I tried to empathize with my user base and began to brainstorm and ideate the main product feature of PitchDeals.
brainstorming + mood boards
Images and mood boards were created to help fuel the idea process for what PitchDeals means as a product, literally and figuratively. Capturing the words of the brand into an actionable product was part of the goal in the designing phase.
information architecture
From there, due to the limited scope, we decided to focus on the main design feature, which was to “pitch a deal” for saving money on eating at restaurants during different times of the day. Understanding the information architecture was necessary to continue onto the wireframes, mockups and prototype.
user flow
The user flow was devised to make the main feature of the product as straight forward as possible, and that we could reflect the effectiveness of the flow to the conversation of users finding and going to restaurants at certain times.
wireframes
From here, I began sketching and wireframing the main feature, which was iterated on as the main landing page in different forms. Making multiple designs of the layout of elements showed what to prioritize for the user, and highlighting the features that would best address the needs of the users throughout the website.
mockups
After necessary iterations, I moved to the next task of mockups and the prototype. Incorporating the current brand colors as well as exploring other designs was a part of the initial product iterations. The goal was to move to making a prototype that would capture our user research, persona, and main feature to its best ability in order for it to be tested.
The prototype of the landing page and main feature of finding restaurants with good deals is demonstrated in the link below. Let me know what you think!
next steps
Through the process from start of the idea to the prototype of the main feature, I believe the design hits the user goals of the persona, a working professional that has a flexible lunch schedule, find restaurant deals, and also the business goals of getting people to eat at downtimes and offer options that minimize food waste. The implementation of the feature would be better understood after more user testing, which the team hoped to do in future iterations.
Overall this product was a look at combining multiple product needs for the user as well as the business, and I look forward to applying my contribution to the project to a mobile version for new users to test and give feedback. This was a great learning experience researching, designing and evaluating PitchDeals.