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On this project in early 2022, I was tasked with being the Head UX Designer during the ideation phase, and also assisted the UI Designer on visuals and animations later.

challenge: Design an app that allows customers to make changes and personalize their orders in any way they'd like.

solution: UPSCALE is a mobile restaurant & food delivery service that offers unique meal options and encourages users to customize their dishes in ways never before allowed by traditional restaurants.

With many people now hesitant to dine in at restaurants due to recent events, the amount of food delivery orders have increased by 113% in the past few years, yet the quality of those orders have dropped significantly.

This app hopes to be a solution for those large numbers of people currently dissatisfied with their restaurant delivery orders and those bored with ordering the same old dishes cooked in the same old ways.

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research goals:

design / test / iterate:

After getting a better general idea of customers initial habits and feelings about ordering food, it was time to create some wireframes and low-fi mockups to bring the idea of UPSCALE to life.

Designing a food ordering app from scratch wouldn't be necessary, seeing as how there are so many existing examples to pull ideas from.

Our challenge for this particular app would be in how we designed the most important and unique aspect of this app, which would be the ability to customize the orders in any way. Adding the customization features without making the app bloated with options would be a challenge.

Since we are working with a food truck that has a short menu, we felt pre-loaded customizations for each dish would work as an input option. A burger, for example, would have checkbox options for toppings (i.e., mustard, pickles, etc.), a drop down menu option for "Cook Level" (i.e., well done, medium well, etc.) and a text entry box for any remaining changes.

design / test / iterate:

After an unmoderated user test on low-fi mock-up #3, we found that the combination of input methods for customizations was working well, and we also became aware of an very important issue:

We also became aware of a very important issue in regards to the customization options:

insights:

We (almost) made the mistake of being so focused on to the customization functions of the app, that we neglected to include a "no customizations needed" ordering option.

This app was being designed mostly for those who regularly made lots of changes with their orders, but we also didn't want to neglect the other half of customers who don't make many changes. So we added a "Quick Order" option in the final hi-fi mockup.

hi-fi mockups:

In the end, i feel the team and I succeeded in created a simple yet robust ordering system for this one-of-a-kind app. i truly had fun navigating the challenges and blending and kinds of ideas and input from the team and the participants.