Connect with foodie buddies in your community
Enjoy your favorite food, and time with the cook

This is an individual project where I designed an app that focus on "community" for single inhabitants, and which involves need definding, ideation, comparative analysis, user-journeying, paper prototyping, hifidelity and interative prototypes completed in 10 weeks.

Living alone and cooking by oneself is not at all an interesting story.

the Problem

sketch for story of a single-inhabitant who cook and dine alone

“Cooking that small amount I'd rather skip it”

"leftovers again..."

“I'm tired of eating my own sandwiches every day”

Cooking for oneself is too hard.

- Cooking the small amount for oneself inhibits people's motivation to cook.
- People get tired of eating the same several dishes that one can cook all the time.

Can't find other foodie buddies.

- Current cooking app are not satisfying. Food-lovers do not feel like connected with each other whom they can enjoy food in the neighborhood and exchanging recipes with.

Sketch for story of cook-lover who want to find potluck buddies

“There is no one I can exchange recipes with”

"I wish to tickle my taste buds."

Let's be connected!

my approach

Eating good food with friends is one of the joys of life. To connect people who seek the pleasure of various kinds of food and who have the hidden social need of eating, my design encourages and facilitates potluck meetup in the community. Potluck style meetup is a good idea with distributed food preparations among a group of people where they come to dine together and have good food and conversations.

Need Assessment

Design Philosophy of this product

1

Food serves as a great bridge for people to be connected. Life story sharing, business collaborations, emotion catharsis...We can never image the potentiality of food in people's social engagement.

2

As “screen time” has taken place much of “face time” in people’s social communication. My design aims to encourage in-person interaction by creating a online platform for people to find FOORIENDS offline.

cook
upload the picture of your own cooking and swipe through others' mouth-watering pics

connect
mutual-like each other will connect you two as "Fooriend"

chat
message your fooriends to find out who to meet and ask about their recipes

cheers
RSVP to your fooriend's potluck invitations or
start your own one

a

Profile

| Inclusiveness
No worry as a vegetarian or vegan!

| Fun
Hard to figure out how many food need for the potluck? -- Tell us how many pizza slices you normally eat. Bon appetite!

| Iterations

version 1.0

b

Browse

c

Chat, Share, Invite

d

Event - RSVP and Start Your Own

If the prototype is not showing up on your computer,
you can go to: my Fooriend prototype on marvel app

Interactive Prototype

<- Click the play button

or if you want to see the paper prototype at earlier stage

This is version II, and 1.25x speed would save you some time

Reasons behind the Design

- Who will be using the app?

- How to find the right food-maker?

Image is the key.

As soon as people see an image, they form an idea of whether they like it or not. It will reduce the user fatigue early on, and it would trigger people's curiosity - What is it made from? Does it taste good? Am I able to make it?

- What should be the interaction

A SWIPE will do.

Interaction is the key. It should be simple and easy enough for user to engage with. One inspiration comes from social dating apps. By analyzing the successful ones, I found the swiping left for dislike, and right for favor is the easiest, fastest way to browse through a large number of pictures and categorize them. If they want to see the details of a dish/recipe, just click.

- Color? Culture?

Be color neutral.

- Veggie? Vegan?

Utilize the filter.

For food option, a lot of people have special requirements, e.g. vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan, or allergy, lactose intolerance, etc. It might also be that you want certain type of food for that day. The tags of the dishes and person will help filter out the food you want. Bon appetite!

- How to boost commitment

Mutual like + Ratings.

Only mutual like with connect you with others, so it urges user to maintain a good profile. Due to that it is you will meet someone you've never seen before, safety is a concern brought up from user interviews. So in this app, a user rating system is integrated. Each user will have a rating keyword description from other persons they've had a offline potluck meet.