As part of the Purdue UX program's Experience Studio course at Purdue, I collaborated with 8 other UX Design students in a project sponsored by Avanade. Avanade is an IT management consulting company focused on the Microsoft platform.
The final product of this project was a set of high-fidelity prototypes made in Figma. These are shown below. Continue reading to learn about the project background and my group's design process.
Avanade tasked us with enhancing one of Purdue's services or infrastructures by improving its function through usability and sustainability. Our group focused on improving the experience of Purdue's retail restaurants on campus.
Wait times and lines at restaurants and dining courts are a continuous issue for busy students at Purdue. Our group decided to focus on improving the dining experience in retail restaurants at the Purdue Memorial Union. This would significantly shorten lines and wait times on campus. Mobile ordering has been an important part of the dining experience on campus for several years. For this reason, we implemented elements of the mobile ordering experience in our final deliverables.
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Our research process consisted of primary and secondary research. We conducted our secondary research through literature reviews and affinity diagramming. Our primary research and data collection consisted of a survey, interviews, and ethnographic observations. Through this research we were able to discover user pain points such as lack of menu information for dietary restrictions, order inaccuracy, and uncomfortable waiting areas. These research insights led the direction of our project.
At this point, our research insights pointed us in the direction of broadening our scope. We decided to focus on the holistic dining experience. We expanded our scope to include two main issues pertaining to the Purdue dining experience: the ordering process and the dining environment.
We then began our ideation process with low fidelity sketches. We iterated on these sketches through ideation activities such as round robin sketching, creating a user journey map, and storyboarding. Below are some pictures that highlight this stage in our design process including low fidelity sketches and a stage from our storyboard.
We split our low fidelity mockups into 4 stages: preorder, ordering process, checkout, and pickup.
The pre-ordering stage consists of the user looking through restaurants, wait times, and meal swipe availability. As a side note, meal swipes are part of Purdue's meal plan in which student's have preloaded money from the beginning of every semester that they can spend each week.
The mockups in the ordering process stage display all retail restaurant menus in the Purdue Memorial Union. An important aspect that we gathered in our research stage was that users want the ability to have extensive menu information. This means they want to see dietary options, nutrition facts, pictures, and meal descriptions. At this stage the user is able to get a comprehensive overview and click on the item for more information.
In the checkout stage, when the user is ready to checkout, they can view all items in their cart and see what items can be paid for regularly vs. using a meal swipe. The user is prompted to pay separately as they would in any on-campus restaurant. Then the user can chose their payment method and confirm payment.
The pickup stage pertains to the physical dining environment. A locker system protects your food and enables a more efficient pickup process. Once the food is ready, the user is notified of the locker location and is able to open and close their locker successfully from their mobile phone.
We created a testing protocol to better understand how we could improve and iterate off of our designs. Our goal for user testing was to evaluate and analyze the heuristics of our current low-fidelity prototype and identify areas for improvement. Through our protocol, team members conducted one-on-one usability testing sessions. In these sessions, we introduced our participants to a few preliminary screens from each stage and asked them to identify the function of the page as well as answer pre-recorded questions. Our feedback found that we needed to place a bigger emphasis on the physical dining space interactions through our prototypes. We also found that content, readability, and understanding was lower than we expected with these prototypes. Increasing the fidelity of the prototypes could help solve this problem. This led us to the development of our mid-fidelity mockups.
We carried the insights from our testing to allow us to iterate on our previous designs. We created mid fidelity designs in Figma with a more thorough ordering process and pickup process, considering all the screens necessary to improve the dining experience. In focusing on our physical space, we added a few new screens including a physical receipt that would allow the user to monitor food wait time.
After completing our mid-fidelity prototypes we conducted another round of usability testing. Our goal for this round of usability testing was to ensure that our designs were seamless and intuitive to our user. We used the same testing protocol, however, we changed the pre-recorded questions to match our goal for this round of usability testing. From this round of usability testing, participants expressed that they were confused with how to access lockers to pickup food, experienced difficulty reading certain texts, were confused with profile info, and were confused with meal swipe hours. We incorporated this feedback into our final design. In our final design, we aimed to construct more sophisticated designs that worked for not only students, but also the employees who worked at these restaurants.