Brief: The current Five Guys app has many glitches and is unused. The main goals are to allow customers to order and pay in the app to avoid in-store queues, and to split a bill during the ordering process. None of the competitors currently offer the option to split a bill, so this added efficiency would entice users to choose Five Guys over other fast food restaurants.
My role: I took on a facilitator role; I conducted the design studios and ensured that all deadlines were met. I created an affinity map of our research findings and I was in charge of our sketch file and creating the mid-fi prototype. I led usability tests and incorporated the comments from the paper prototype (such as how to create a group, group status information and menu items) into the mid-fi. After testing the mid-fi, I worked on one more iteration of the mid-fi prior to it going to hi-fi. After the project was finished, I worked on the hi-fi prototype a little bit more to add some screens that we had discussed but were not created.
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One of the first things we did after receiving the brief was to conduct a site visit to a Five Guys in Angel to learn more about the company, the users (and observe demographics), the brand and the values. We also wanted to interview people at the restaurant to learn about their habits, and how frequently they eat out and where.
We conducted 13 interviews, 4 at the restaurant and 9 scheduled, because each type of interview could provide us with the different information. The interviews at the restaurant were useful to gain insight about Five Guys and the ordering process, whereas the other interviews were focused on current apps that they use and the pain points within them. I merged all of our results into an affinity map, shown below.
To understand the current app better, we ordered food from the app and compared that to our seamless in-store experience. The process of ordering food through the app was not as pleasant as the in-store experience because the queue moved fast and the restaurant provided a pleasant interior with snacks to keep users distracted about time. We created an experience map of the process to look at the user flow and assess the length of the process.
Pain point: Customisation in the app created a tedious and long process, causing the user to get hungry and impatient while using it.
A main finding was that there is a real disconnect between the happiness of those at the restaurant and app users. A big aim was to reconnect the two and design an app that creates as pleasant of an experience as the restaurant itself.
Our persona, David, sums up all of our interviews and research. David needs a way to share the bill because he often organises lunch for the office and is stuck getting owed money.
Our next phase, ideation, began with a design studio that I conducted. We did this to get all members to generate ideas to see the different features and ideas that the team had and to create a large list of design options. During the design studio, we generated ideas individually and then critiqued and voted as a group- concluding in us sketching one final design together.
After we had a clear understanding of the scope of the application and the process that we needed for our MVP (most viable product) I created a user flow for David and how he would use the app.
Our design process started with a low-fidelity paper prototype that was a quick way to put our ideas together to begin to test them. To validate our design we conducted usability tests of each iteration of our prototypes. This was essential to see where the users had issues and to to discuss and design ways to fix them.
A large role that I had within the project was to summarise the results from the paper prototype tests and implement them into a mid-fi digital prototype.
We tested the high fidelity prototype and came up with some future steps that we wanted to achieve that would not fit into the 2 week sprint. Since the sprint I have worked on those changes and below is the final walk through of the hi-fi prototype with my changes:
I learnt how a UX progress could be divided in a group and how to lead a small group of people. Our interviews were vital to understand how people use food apps in general as well as what the users at Five Guys expect from the brand. Our brief was very specific about wanting to split the bill, and this required a lot of research and testing to figure out how to integrate it into the app seamlessly, without an addition of too many steps. After the project finished, I added more information about tracking, and changed the layout of some of the menu items following usability testing of our hi-fi prototype and questions from the final presentation.
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