Roots: Your Mobile Hub for Local Experiences

Your one stop shop for experiencing all things locally-sourced, Roots is an iOS mobile app that connects people to locally-sourced restaurants and food-related activities around the world in an effort to create and support sustainable local communities.

Sector

Nonprofit, Culture, Community, Restaurant & Food

Challenge

Users desire to experience locally-sourced restaurants and activities, support their local community, and engage in authentic culture, but lack the knowledge and tools to find these experiences. The absence of a platform to connect users solely to locally-sourced food-related experiences and authentic culture revealed an opportunity.

Solution

To address this challenge, I designed Roots, an iOS mobile app to focus on locally-sourced restaurants and food-related activities around the world in an effort to support local communities.

The app promotes local suppliers and encourages cultural experiences when users are staying local or when they’re travelling.

My Role

User interface design, user & market research, usability testing, research analysis, ideation, information architecture, and prototyping

Project Time

10 months

Millennials and Gen Z travellers crave authentic food-related experiences, and locally-sourced ingredients provide these immersive cultural experiences by directly promoting a land’s local food and traditions, which in turn supports local suppliers and creates sustainable food chains.

Market Research

Competitor Analysis

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the market, a competitor analysis of 12 food-searching mobile apps indicated that the majority of these apps fail to highlight locally-sourced restaurants or food-related activities. Moreover, those that attempt to do so are often characterized by poor design.

Well-established apps such as Google Maps, Yelp, and Tripadvisor, while well-designed, lack a dedicated emphasis on local suppliers and food-related activities. This underscores the significant opportunity for a platform like Roots to fill this gap and provide a focused solution.

In this case, the main goal was to gather information for creating the future website design and to allow objective discussions about it. Still, this exercise can be used for so much more, for example, to define the “filter” marketing copy has to run through (voice attributes) and what it should be about (x-factor).

User Research

I conducted 16 semi-structured user interviews in order to obtain rich, qualitative data to understand users’ experiences with searching for food-related experiences. In addition, I formulated a questionnaire completed by 50 participants to validate my collected data and collect more quantitative data. These research methods allowed me to derive deeper and more thorough insights on specific topics.

Analysis

Affinity Mapping

Affinity mapping was employed to organize essential information, phrases, quotes, and sentiments gathered from the interviews, extracting key themes among users. I revisited the map over the course of several days, refining and clarifying the themes to ensure more accurate representation of findings.

These research methods allowed me to derive deeper and more thorough insights on specific topics.

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Key Findings

The affinity mapping unveiled 7 overarching themes and numerous sub-themes. These themes highlight commonalities in users’ sentiments and capture the connections within the data, ultimately informing the development of key features.

Subsequently, I assessed key insights derived from 70-100% of users, considering both the interviews and questionnaires. The following section outlines the findings that present the most significant opportunities.

These research methods allowed me to derive deeper and more thorough insights on specific topics.

User Personas & Journeys

The synthesis of user research and key findings culminated in the development of 3 user personas and their corresponding journey maps. These personas directly mirror the collected data, highlighting distinct user types along with their goals, frustrations, motivations, behaviors, and personality traits.

The journey maps delineate each persona’s unique experience in searching for a restaurant, illustrating their actions, emotions, behaviors, and feelings throughout this process.

Ideation

Problem Statement

Having analyzed the data, I formulated a problem statement that encapsulates the user, their needs, and the insights derived from user research. This foundational statement serves as a compass for the project, guiding the ideation of key features and establishing a clear direction.

I chose this brainstorming technique as it allowed for an efficient ideation session with a new perspective of viewing the problem and finding solutions.

Key Features

Following a comprehensive analysis and prioritization of the brainstormed ideas, I identified nine key features for the Roots app. These features are derived from the sentiments expressed by the majority of user and will essentially shape the core functionalities and design that the app offers.

Branding

After considering various names for the app, I selected “Roots” because it symbolizes the profound cultural connections ingrained in diverse global communities, particularly in the realm of food.

The term “roots” is also associated with plants and produce, establishing a relatable connection to both of these essential aspects that encapsulate the app’s overarching goals.

I conducted a brainstorm session for the logo design, focusing on highlighting the app’s association with locally grown ingredients. Users were invited to vote on their preferred options, ultimately contributing to the development of the current logo.

UI Design Rationale

Roots aims for a clean, simple, and structured UI design that accentuates beautiful food, ingredients, and cultures, aligning with the project goals. Drawing inspiration from popular user-friendly apps, the design seeks to evoke a sense of familiarity while distinguishing itself from competitors through a fresh approach to content and visual styling.

I additionally examined contemporary trends in the UI design of restaurants and food-searching apps to draw inspiration. I integrated UI design best practices, including establishing a clear hierarchy of information, maintaining consistent styling of components and actions, employing strategic use of color, adhering to principles of spacing and grouping, ensuring intuitive navigation, and providing system status feedback.

Prototyping

User Flow Diagram

Considering the key features, I developed a user flow diagram that encompasses the various pages, decisions, and actions a user will encounter while navigating through the app. Rectangles denote pages, diamonds represent decisions, and circles indicate actions.

This diagram played a crucial role in defining the majority of page types required for design and exploring the logical flow of information within the application as a starting point. I utilized this diagram as a foundation to build upon during the prototyping phase.

Initial Concepts

I initiated the prototyping process by generating swift and straightforward sketches before translating them into a digital layout. This approach enabled me to focus on establishing the structural foundation for the app during its early stages, steering clear of delving into intricate details of imagery, typography, and colors. These finer elements would be addressed in subsequent iterations of the designs.

Low-fidelity Prototype

The sketches were digitally translated into Figma to craft a low-fidelity interactive prototype. Within this phase, I delved into the arrangement of dietary preferences, onboarding screens, navigation bars, and search functionalities on the app.

Furthermore, I fine-tuned the content and placement of components to ensure a more logical flow of information, including the creation of distinct search pages for restaurants and food activities.

I intentionally kept this iteration less detailed to minimize time investment in design before obtaining user input.

Mid-fidelity Prototype

In this iteration, I delved into colors, typography, imagery, and interactions to breathe life into the Roots brand. Additionally, I expanded the number of screens to illustrate the sequences and processes outlined in the user flow diagram, such as making a reservation, filtering options, searching via map, and accessing information about individual restaurants.

High-fidelity Prototype

In this iteration, I finished building all the remaining screens for the app. I refined components and visual styles, restructured content, and enhanced key processes.

I realized that the user flow diagram turned out to be more high-level, as more detailed steps and paths of action were organically uncovered during the design process that were not initially considered. Designing for nearly all possible user actions within the app presented a challenge, but it provided valuable preparation for creating a comprehensive prototype in the future.

Account Creation & Onboarding

Dietary preferences contribute to personalised content and suggestions within the app.

During onboarding, screens highlight essential aspects of the app, such as exploring global restaurants and food-related activities, fostering local community support, and engaging with diverse cultures.

Exploring Restaurants & Food-Related Activities

Discover locally-sourced restaurants and engage with local suppliers through various activities.

Explore new local businesses and suppliers, receive personalized recommendations, explore the best cultural experiences, and discover the suppliers of the week.

Efficient search functionality includes an intuitive map view, detailed filtering and sorting options, and curated search content recommendations.

Restaurant & Food Activity Pages

Transparency regarding the distribution channels of local suppliers and the origins of restaurant ingredients.

Explore cultural insights from restaurants and information on diverse cuisines and culinary traditions.

Connect with chefs, restaurant owners, and suppliers.

Browse through menus, view photos, and access detailed reviews and ratings.

Writing a Review & Adding a Photo

The review process ensures accuracy by categorizing ratings for price, food quality, ambiance, service, cultural experience, and authenticity.

Inspiration and Connecting with Friends

Explore what friends are sharing to find inspiration for your next culinary adventure. The ‘Discover’ feed is customized according to the user’s preferences. Read articles covering a variety of topics related to locally-sourced items.

Create a Trip & Organise Food Experiences

Manage trip reservations and experiences for locally-sourced restaurants & food activities when travelling
Add friends to collaborate during trip planning

Usability Testing

User Flow Diagram

I conducted two rounds of usability testing—one to evaluate the low-fidelity prototype and another for the mid-fidelity prototype. Users were tasked with activities aligned with key features, such as searching for a restaurant or food activity. I employed affinity mapping to identify themes within the user feedback, facilitating a clearer visualization of the data.

Insights from the testing uncovered significant usability issues related to search functionalities, the layout and content of restaurant pages, content labeling, and the onboarding process. These issues were addressed in the subsequent prototype iteration.

Testing fostered a more collaborative approach by involving users in design decisions early on and incorporating their unfiltered feedback.

Reflection

Overall, this project has achieved its goals and users expressed excitement and enthusiasm when interacting with the Roots app. A few key points of reflection from this project include:

Collaboration within an individual conceptual project is valuable and important. While this was a solo project, getting feedback from colleagues, peers, and users throughout all phases of the design thinking process revealed new perspectives and ideas I would not have otherwise explored.
This is a good reminder to not be siloed in my work and connect with others to discover new insights.
Budget and resources can greatly impact a project’s scope but provides high potential for the future. With higher investment, Roots can expand its offerings to Android devices and responsive web design for a more cohesive offering across multiple platforms, explore more sentiments expressed by users from interviews, and recruit participants that are fully representative of the target demographic.
Conducting and analysing user interviews & usability tests yields is a highly valuable experience. Directly engaging with users allowed me to empathise with them better and realise the importance of a user-centred approach to design.
While this project could have benefitted from more testing, the rich qualitative data I was able to work with revealed deeper and more accurate findings for a stronger end product.
Working within constraints boosts creativity. With COVID19 raging throughout the course of this project and restrictions in place, I relied on video conferencing software to conduct remote interviews and usability tests.
While interviews with locally-sourced restaurant owners were unable to happen, I was able to use secondary research to try and make up for these perspectives.

Arjun SS

Media

Work

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