Problem Statement
Flying Fruit Cafe is on campus of University of Baltimore. In order to place an order, customers have to personally visit the cafe and frequently they have to face a very long wait lines. This is not always feasible because students and professors try to grab food in between classes. I got to know about this problem from customer complaints and from talking to the staff in the cafe.
Key Outcomes & Success Metrics
This is a project I did in collaboration with the cafe's manager and our professor. So, I did the project in a week submitted the app concept as an assignment in my class. Since it's just a week long project, I couldn't get to the visual design part of the project.
My Responsibilities
This is a project I did in collaboration with the cafe's manager and our professor. So, I did the project in a week submitted the app concept as an assignment in my class. Since it's just a week long project, I couldn't get to the visual design part of the project.
Process
Discover
To understand the problem a little better, I started with talking to the manager himself and then to staff to understand the problem a little better and I spoke to a couple of students who were trying to make a purchase in that cafe when I was there. Here are some of the comments that I heard about the exixting process.
Sometimes even after standing in line for almost 10-15 minutes, students just walk out because its taking too long - Steve (Store manager)
I hardly get 15-30 minutes a day for lunch. sometimes not even that - Tanya (Law Student)
Smart phones have become very prevalent these days and everybody has at least one if not more. We can do most of our dealings on smart phones from ordering a cab to plan an itinerary to buying vegetables to find an exotic place to eat in an unfamiliar part of the city. So, I figured a mobile app would be a lot easier for them to place and track the order.
Based on the paper menu that the cafe manager provided us, they only sell bagels and smoothies. I made an assumption to add salads, fruit shakes, desserts, coffee & tea. Also, the whimsical fruit characters were provided to us by the cafe manager.
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Define
Once I confirmed that this is a problem worth exploring, I started with creating a persona.
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Design
With enough information to go further, I started sketching.
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Deliver / Implement
Once I have a good solution in place, I moved on to making the wireframes. Here's a short video of that
Outcomes & Lessons
If I had a little more time,
I would have done some more research.
I would have created some more sketch concepts before jumping into wireframes.
I would have created a high fidelity mock-ups and user tested them with other users.
Although, this was done in a week, it was very well received by the cafe manager and staff. Even the users I tested my prototype with mentioned that this would be a welcome change to the current cafe system and would save a lot of time.
