Chow

Chalet

Portfolio Project

Developed a mobile application through visual design, user experience design, wireframing, prototyping, usability studies, user research, user interviews, and design iterations.

July 2023 to September 2023

Role
UX/UI Designer

THE CLIENT
Chow Chalet is an upscale food truck serving gourmet American fare in the heart of New York City. Located in a popular food truck lot and traveling to various pop-up events, it caters to adventurous young professionals who proudly identify as "foodies."

Process
Empathize - Define - Ideate - Test

PROJECT OVERVIEW

  • The food truck's popularity brought unexpected challenges. Customers grew increasingly frustrated with unpredictable wait times, fumbling with punch cards to track their rewards, and struggling to keep up with the truck's constantly changing locations.

  • I addressed this issue by conducting interviews and usability studies on wireframes, resulting in a mobile app that allows customers to place and customize orders, stay updated on events and the truck's location, and track their rewards—all in one place.

Empathize & Define

Before drafting any designs, I needed to understand our customers and identify solutions that best meet their needs. To achieve this, I conducted in-depth interviews with a diverse group of customers to uncover insights into their experiences, preferences, and challenges when placing orders. During these interviews, I uncovered challenges that Chow Chalet had yet to identify, such as customers' frustration with tracking rewards and being unaware of the truck’s location changes, which made planning visits difficult.

Defining The Problem

REWARDS

Frequent lunchtime visitors sought to capitalize on Chow Chalet's loyalty program. However, the inefficiency of punch cards often led to misplacement or forgetfulness, making it challenging for customers to track their rewards.

LOCATION

Due to its popularity, many customers traveled to NYC to try the esteemed food truck. However, frequent unplanned pop-up events often left customers unaware of its location, making it difficult to plan visits and resulting in lost sales opportunities.

To distill and visualize the insights gathered from the interviews, I crafted personas and user journey maps. These visual representations deepened our understanding of users' emotions, thoughts, actions, and pain points.

Moreover, this process empowered me to anticipate potential accessibility challenges and develop proactive solutions. These insights now form the cornerstone of my strategy for addressing customer pain points in the next stage.

Armed with user insights, my design mission was twofold: to craft a user experience that seamlessly blended efficiency with Chow Chalet's commitment to delivering a premium food truck experience. The objective? To develop an app that not only facilitated swift and hassle-free ordering but also fostered an immersive and captivating user journey.

Let’s See What We Can Cook Up

Ideation & Prototyping

I initiated the design process by crafting wireframes focused on showcasing key app information prominently on the welcome screen and guiding users seamlessly through the ordering process. Subsequently, the order screen was meticulously designed to offer customers a streamlined, concise ordering experience, enabling them to easily edit and review their orders for accuracy before submission. These wireframes allowed me to visually map out user flows to ideate an intuitive user experience.

Prototyping

From these wireframes, I created a low-fidelity prototype with a primary focus on the food ordering flow, the application's main feature. This prototype allowed me to further visualize the way users would experience the product and would be my tool of choice for user testing.

You can view the full low-fidelity prototype below.

User Testing & Refinement

The Taste Test

To begin user testing, I recruited five users and assigned them a series of tasks to complete. The testing was conducted in person, allowing me to observe their interactions with the application. I followed up with a survey to compare their feedback with my observations. This research revealed several usability concerns:

  1. Users struggled to locate the section for updating personal information.

  2. The excessive number of screens confused users about their current task.

  3. The order customization options lacked individual item customization, which was a primary user concern.

To address the usability concerns, I began by rethinking the homescreen layout. Rethinking the layout allowed me to create a better flow for users as they’re placing an order and minimize the amount of screens the user had to interact with on to complete the task, which in turn brought me to rethink the way they navigated through the appplication. In doing so, I changed the food categories from being on drop downs from the menus screen to being a sliding navigation bar across the top of the screen. In doing so, at any point in the flow, the user would know where they are in the application and what they’re doing, eliminating the confusion that they previously had while using the application.

In addition to the adjustments in the way the app flow, I changed ambiguous icons, refined titles, and refined the colors to ensure accessibility and further enhance the user’s experience.

Design Mockups

Results

The Finished Product

The end result was a dynamic app that was:

  • Accessible: Achieved WCAG 2.1 AA compliance through rigorous testing

  • Effective: Usability testing showed 95% task success rate, 25% faster than previous version

  • Branded: Maintained consistent look and feel with 95% brand asset usage

The completion of this project allowed me to gain valuable knowledge about UX design principles that will inform and elevate my future work.

User Feedback

After completing this project, I conducted a follow-up study with the same participants:

  • 100% noted appreciation for my attention to detail

  • 95% felt their concerns were properly addressed

View the Design

To explore this design yourself, click the button below: