Today’s Crave
Project Brief
Today’s Crave was created to serve the purpose of providing users the ability of searching for specific and individual menu items, rather than searching for diffrent restaurants as a whole. This project was created and designed for my UX/UI & Web Design (I) class during at Clemson University.
The Problem
The issue with other restaurant location apps, is that the user has to search for a restaurant or eatery filtered to the type of food, then also has to proceed to search online for the menu to see if they sell an individual menu item.
The Goal
Today’s Crave was created to serve the purpose of providing an app for users have the ability of searching for specific and individual menu items, rather than searching for dinnerent restaurants as a whole. The app was designed for individual menu item searches, in addition to searching for restaurant location, information, reviews, etc.
My Responsibilities
Branding, sketching, wireframing, high fidelity designs, prototyping, and style guides.
Tools Utilized
Sketch, InVision + Craft, Adobe Photoshop
The Process
Define
Ideate
Create
Test
Define
Initial Proposal
The app should convey a simple, eye catching and accessible interface for the company Today’s Crave. The app needs to allow users to easily search specific menu items and to browse through restaurants near them. Design a modern “diner” theme, while also conveying a fun yet minimal design. The colors for the brand should be versitle, bright, and have a nice contrast with each other. The color pallet should be refreshing, something that isn’t overly popular among branding to help the company stand out from others.
Wireframing
The wireframe of your sketches becomes the backbone of developing an apps design. This is the starting point of a concrete design, where you can digitally work, then share and receive feedback from classmates, or my professor. This will highlight any kind of design imperfections, so you can fix them before diving into a fully designed product.
Ideate
Sketching
Laid out all of the screens I would need for creating a completely functional app. Used sketching to formulate various different layouts, design styles ,and ideas that flowed through my head.
Design
Style Guide
The style guide for Today’s Crave app design strongly illustrates the theme of the brand, and what to expect for the app design in itself. The style guide gives insight of a bio, background elesments, brand colors, logos, pagination, button styles and icons, and typography elements.
High Fidelity Design
Made some minor changes from my wireframe, do to the look and feel, not matching my initial solution. The page that found the most change between wireframe and high fidelity is the favorites/archives screen. Without the use of images, it felt that it was too boring for a food app. Images would be a huge resource for users to ultimitley decide to go eat at a restaurant, as it is one of the main things that helps one to decide.
Test
Prototyping
Prototyping is one of the most important steps within the process of design an app. This allows one to test the design, essentially giving your design elements roads to other pages. These prototypes can be used to share with clients, mentors, and used for feedback. The prototypes were created using InVision with the Craft plug-in.
Key Learnings
What this project taught me
Most of the time, less is more in terms of functionality and usability. The more elements you place in a design, the more conjested a design can become and this is really easy to do in reference to an app design.
Ask yourself questions while designing– Does this flow make sense? Could an older user easily read or see this?, Does this design fully achieve your goal?, etc.
Pay attention to the fine details. Someone will always find the smallest of errors; whether is in the grid, spelling and grammar errors, or non-functional buttons on artboard 17.