Food Blend

Context

Beli is an app that allows users to share food recommendations with friends, personalizing the food experience and building a community among foodies. As someone who loves venturing new foods, I wanted to reduce decision fatigue when deciding a place to eat. This idea was a part of an independent case study in my Digital Product Design class at Cornell.

PROBLEM + RESEARCH

How does Beli help people decide a place to eat?

After interviewing four individuals, I was able to get a better idea as to how Beli is used and how food discovery currently looks like.

"After receiving a notification from my friend, I opened the app to browse and rank the restaurant we went to together."

"When I want to eat with my friends, I use beli and surf the app through the feed to look for recommendations."

"Beli encourages me to try new places to eat through the school leaderboard and ranking system."

Insights from the interview:

Revisiting the People Problem

When I am deciding on a place to eat, I want to choose a restaurant based on personalized recommendations, so I can confidently choose a place that I will enjoy. But this is hard because:

1. 1It is hard to connect personalized recommendation system with friend's activity to make a decision
2. 2Existing solutions has a place for multiple user input without a specific direction in where to take them

Market Research

How do existing products provide recommendations?

Yelp provides anonymous reviews with details for ratings and specific notes from random users. Google Maps provides recommendations mostly from where the user is located and they’d have to search it up. Both of these experiences are isolated, focusing on getting reviews or navigating to the place.

Spotify blend provide recommendations through themed-playlists or shared playlists with friends. Many of the recommended songs are based on the user’s current listening experience. Friends’ activity is also used to build the shared playlists.

Brainstorming

How do we maintain and prioritize trust while streamlining the process of transforming personalized recommendation to meaningful decisions?

From the research, I centered my solutions around answering this question. I identified three opportunity areas to brainstorm more specific solutions, coming up with two specific solutions in each of the spaces — six solutions total.

After completed SWOT and feasibility& impact analysis of each solution, I decided to focus on the Food Blend and Plate Off feature where users can compare recommendations that are compatible to come to a decision. Through Food Blend, the user invites their friends to generate a list. Plate Off allows users to compare each of the restaurants by swiping left or right to generate a ranked list.

Visualizing the solution...

In the Future

If I had more time...

Reflection

What I learned.

1. 1

   Continue iterating! There were moments where I was stuck when designing, but creating more iterations led to new directions of the project.

2. 2

   Adapt to changes — When iterating and designing my solution, Beli had developed new features that addressed parts of my problem space. I had to make revisions to ensure that my solution did not create any redundant features. Although the design process can sometimes be unpredictable, it has pushed me to be more creative.

3. 3

   User empathy — It was important for me to recognize that the problem I identified early on did not encompass the full user experience. By revisiting my people problem, I create specific solutions centered around the user to design product with intention.