JustPick

MY ROLE

• Product Manager

• UX Researcher

• UX Designer

USE CASE

A group of people want discover a new restaurant to eat and come to a consensus of where to go eat out tonight.

POTENTIAL USERS

Group of Friends

A group of friends seeking to enjoy a nice dinner with each other and enjoy each others company.

Pain Point: With multiple people eating together it is hard to accommodate everyone’s tastes and pick a restaurant in which everyone will be happy.

The Bachelor
A bachelor who has a lot of disposable income but is not a good cook. He eats out very often.

Pain Point: Wants to try a new place to eat but does not know where to go.

Prioritized User Groups

For the purpose of prioritizing to one target audience, we picked couples and groups of friends. This allowed us to focus our user research and build an effective solution.

MARKET RESEARCH - Competitive Analysis

We discovered 4 direct competition incumbents through our research. We were able to distill these lists of top features and pain points for users by mining the online reviews of the applications.

Top Features

• Filter By Location

• Filter By Price

• Filter by Radius

• User Generated List

• PickFilter by Open Status

• Filter By Cuisine

• Filter by Diet

• Ability to like and block restaurants

• Gamification

• Integration with Yelp, Google, OpenTable, etc.

• Establishment Type Filter

  • (Sit-down, Cafe, bar, Fast food, etc.)

• Bill Splitting

  
  

  Through our canvas of the of the market, we also identified 6 indirect competitors to our product concept. These indirect competitions consisted of: Zomato, OpenTable, EatStreet, GrubHub, Yumi, DoorDash,Uber Eats,Yelp, and Postmates.

USER INTERVIEWS

After completing the Competitive Analysis, we focused our attention the user needs. We conducted user interviews with family and friends.

Purpose: To learn about people’s behavior when selecting a restaurant to eat at with other people.

Screening Criteria: Must be at least 18 years of age and eaten out at a restaurant within the last 3 months.

Number of Participants: 8

Recruitment Method: Snowball Method with family and friends

Top Discoveries:

• People are creatures of habit — People typically a have a list of “go-tos” that they rely on when they cannot decide.

• Proximity can be a major criteria for most people. They want to go somewhere close. However, we discovered that people who consider themselves to be “foodies” do not consider proximity to be a major criteria.

• Reviews play a big part in people’s decision making process.

• A mobile device is the top modality that our participants used when selecting a restaurant to eat at.

• We discovered that there are typically two types of roles that people can take when selecting with others. These roles are the decision-maker with clear direction with the idea on how to narrow down the selection. The second being the passive participant who defers to the choice leader.

• Constraints help people make decisions. Particularly people who are passive in the process.

• Factors such as diet restriction and family considerations impact the decision making process.

• Top Criteria for selecting a restaurant included (in no particular order): Price, Proximity, Cuisine, Reviews, and Ratings.

Online Survey

Following the user interviews, we conducted an online survey to gather more user insights.

Purpose: To gather further insights into user’s behaviors and sentiments related to restaurant selections.

Survey Platform: Qualtrics

Number of Participants: 119

Screening Criteria: At least the age of 18 and have eaten out with the last month with individuals.

Recruitment Method: Gain participants through our MBT program cohort, affinity groups, and Facebook Groups.

Top Discoveries:

• The top-seven food categories that participants eat from are: Italian, Mexican, American, Japanese, Pizza, Seafood, and Chinese 

• Most participants are willing to try new restaurants. 

• Most participants eat out between 1-3 times a week.

• The smartphone was the preferred device for participants in our study. 

• The top five search criteria are (in no particular order): Type of Cuisine, Proximity, Cost, Perceived Quality, and Online Menu. 

• Proximity, Type of Cuisine, Menu, Cost, Online Ratings, and Online Reviews remain the top criteria for searching among the personas. However, Online Reviews and Ratings rank higher for Cautious Pickers and Cost ranks lower for Foodies. 

• People saw benefit of an application and would be willing to use to solve the use case.

Personas & Personas Spectrums

Through an analysis of the survey and user interviews, we were able to discover salient points in data. These salient points influence the development of a Persona Spectrum and reveals the emergence of three use-based personas.

Product Canvas

The product canvas guided us with a vision and strategy for the product. It also allowed us to prioritize which features we should focus on first in the development process.

Journey Maps

Next, the experience of our personas were mapped out in User Journey Maps to reveal the use stages of users. These insights influenced our task-flow analysis and mapping.

Task Flow Diagram

The task flow diagram mapped out the sequence of the experience for the main feature (random suggestion pick generator) of the application. This was useful in the design of the interface and understanding the system logic of the application.

Lo-Fi Wireframe

A lo-fi wireframe of the application was the next step once a task flow diagram was created. Below are the screens for the application along with with a link to the interactive wireframe.

Mid-Fi Mockup

Lastly, we created a mid-fi mockup of the application for mobile and web. This was developed to hand-off to development to transition to user-testing.