Overview
Throughout the city of Philadelphia, especially around university campuses, food trucks are a big part of the culture. They are perfect for locals on the go or the many tourists who visit the city. But with how busy city life is, sometimes even a food truck may too time consuming for certain individuals. In the vein of highly successful applications for restaurants such as Chipotle and Taco Bell, wouldn’t it be great to have an application for one of these food trucks that allowed customers not only view the menu but order ahead of time.
Context and Challenges
This project was a culmination of ten weeks of group-based research and development.The team consisted of myself and two others. The idea was to find a local food truck in the city of Philadelphia, conduct research on the style of food, the customers’ habits and from all the information gathered create a mobile application prototype using the UXpin website software.
I had previously worked prototypes before, but this was the first time, that extensive research and testing was required; this included my teammates and I working with the business owner to gather information on the menu, customer base and location of the truck, and putting ourselves in the headspace of any potential user of the app.
Process and Insight
Before we could start building the site we needed to make sure that what we built would be interesting to our users. This required us to ask the question: who are our users? To explore this, our team created user personas. Early observations of Smokin’ Tacos food truck helped us identify three important demographics. Of the those customers who ordered from the truck, it was clear that young locals, white collar locals and blue collar locals frequented the truck.
Young millennials in the urban area of the city, are typically always on the go, and have very little disposable income. This is what makes Smokin’ Tacos so desirable. It appeals to a youth market that is interested saving money. Some of the characteristics we are looking for here, are college students who live off campus; and like to tour around the city. Our white collar and blue collar workers, these individuals, don’t typically have a lot of time on their hands, and are most likely going to be eating a lot on the go. With regards to blue collar workers, we actually noted that these individuals ordered large quantities for their coworkers.
After establishing our users we had to put ourselves in their headspace. We did this by creating a mood board (see top of the page), and a user journey and journey map documents that took us through the process our users could go through as they navigate our potential application.
From this point on, the team worked on bringing the Smokin’ Tacos prototype application to full realization. We started by doing a series of sketches:
From there we moved on to wire frames and paper prototyping, at which point we started conducting user testing to help us refine the functionality:
During our first round of testing, using the paper prototype method, we simultaneously began building the digital prototype in UXpin. We started with basic functionality such as page to page navigation, and also began to explore font and color choices. The remaining week’s of development consisted of several rounds of user testing and application refinement.
Conclusion
Smokin Tacos has the benefit of having a name that conveys style. And we wanted to present this. We wanted our users to feel that this app is hot & fresh. So the purpose of every aesthetic decision we made was to convey this. Our warm colors of red and orange convey the hotness of the brand; while the green conveys the freshness of Smokin Tacos local ingredients. The blackish tint helps bring home that sleekness and style. Finally, we wanted to give the user fully a customizable menu interface that reflected options the customers have when visiting the truck personally.
As final note, The team worked really hard to make this prototype as close to a real app as possible, and aside from the limitations of UXPin software, we were very successful.