Project Overview

Savorite is a small startup in San Diego that connects restaurants with diners by incentivizing dining during off-peak hours using discounts through a free voucher app. Savorite takes pride in being an easy-to-use app that drives diners to connect with their local small businesses.

As a design intern, I was responsible for creating marketing graphics. Redesigning the app was a personal challenge I tackled separate from my internship responsibilities. As a solo project, I ideated and iterated on early concepts, conducted user testing, and delivered a high-fidelity prototype. 

How Savorite Works

Obtaining a discount is a straightforward process. The hungry diner would open the app and scroll through a list or search the map for nearby deals. Once the diner finds a deal that interests them, they would sign-up for a voucher. When purchasing their order, the diner would physically present the voucher to receive their discount.

The Problem

Users are experiencing difficulty in finding restaurants of interest, which is causing indecisiveness and leading to user abandonment. How can we improve the discoverability of restaurants to assist the users search?

While attaining the discount is simple, the few search features and categories make finding a restaurant of interest difficult. During user testing, participants reported that the limited search features and the uncategorized list of options left them feeling indecisive. 

Business Problem

When users struggle to make fast decisions, they spend more time scrolling. This leads to:

1. a decrease in app engagement and, as a result, a low user turn-out
2. a low conversion rate

Goals

1. User Goal - We want to help diners quickly and easily obtain deals with the bonus of trying something new in the San Diego area.
2. Business Goal - The primary metric we would want to look at is the conversion rate. We want to ensure users are successfully signing-up for vouchers.

Explorations

To better understand the current state of the app, I first completed an app analysis. I downloaded the app and analyzed the current functionalities, overall architecture, and user navigation. 

Competitive Analysis

Because Savorite's target consumers are diners and college students, I decided to analyze a couple of popular and similar dining apps for those populations. I downloaded Eatigo, Crave, Yelp, Grubhub, and Uber Eats to analyze the functions and features offered. This allowed me to better understand strategies other apps use and keep track of the type of features offered by each app.

At the time of this project, Savorite was new and lacked user feedback. Therefore, I decided to investigate user feedback from similar dining apps such as Eatigo and Crave which are more established and have been in operation for over 4 years. Through a thorough review of user feedback, I identified a critical pain point that users had encountered regarding the search functionality of the app, and how it affected the overall user experience. By analyzing the reviews for both Eatigo and Crave, I was able to discern the expectations of users during their search journey and any pain points they had encountered.

A New Experience

Savorite was lacking a lot of features at the time. Aside from the recommended search features, I also added a rotating map feature which would allow users to easily scroll through nearby restaurants from a pin.

During usability testing, it was identified that a majority of users (5 out of 6) had difficulty locating the favorites page. To address this issue, I reorganized the navigation and placed the "Favorites" feature in the bottom navigation for improved visibility and accessibility. This change was crucial as the majority of users expressed the importance of the favorites page, and the ability to easily access it would increase user loyalty and retention.

Reflection

This was my very first UX project. However, I am quite proud for how much I accomplished within a short time frame and from reading online tutorials. There were 2 key takeaways I did get from this experience:

1. Centralize the problem. - Redesigning the entire app was a large task with a short deadline. At first, I tried to tackle all the issues with the app including the login and sign-up process. The directors also encouraged adding features to the app that hadn't already existed such as finding creative ways to gamify the app or implementing options to purchase through the app. With too many problems to resolve, I was quickly overwhelmed. By centralizing the problem to one key issue at a time, I was able to fully address a single issue and create a better experience for users in that aspect.
2. It's not always about the aesthetics. - The first priority of the app should be that it serves its function and that it serves its function well. While having a simplistic design may be nice, adding features allows for a better user experience.

Results

While redesigning the app wasn't my responsibility during the internship, my proposed solutions were able to influence key changes in the app's redesign such as creating a more personalized experience and reorganizing the navigation.

Next Steps

If given the opportunity to revisit the Savorite App project, I would prioritize conducting usability testing on the second iteration of the design. Furthermore, I would aim to make improvements in other areas of the user interface (UI) such as creating a more seamless onboarding flow, revising the voucher design, and refining the user profile functionality. Additionally, in terms of visual design, I would consider implementing changes such as increasing the color contrast, implementing a standardized layout grid, and increasing the size of buttons to enhance usability and accessibility.