Forever Cuisine

Forever Cuisine is a mobile app that allows people who love food and explore good restaurants to have a comprehensive platform to see different reviews from foodie influencers. This app also allows foodie influencers to post creative content about food.

Overview

Kevin Tian, Xiao Pan (Engineers), Yimeng Wang (UI Designer)

Team

UX UI Design / User Research /User Flow/Information Architecture / Branding

My Role

Tool

Figma, Principle, Invision, Adobe After Effects

Integrating Tradition with Innovation: Harmonizing the structured functionality of traditional food review apps like Yelp with the dynamic and visual nature of social media poses a key challenge. Ensuring a seamless user experience that accommodates both standard reviews and influencer-generated content demands a thoughtful approach to interface design, striking a balance between information-driven reviews and visually engaging social media elements.

Customization vs. Consistency: Balancing a consistent system with user customization is a pivotal challenge for Forever Cuisine. Allowing users to personalize their experience based on preferences such as parking, pricing, dietary options, and pet-friendliness requires a meticulous approach to system design. Achieving a unified platform that empowers user customization while maintaining reliability and trustworthiness demands careful attention to database structure, algorithm development, and user interface design.

Design Challenge

Quick Peek of Final Solutions

Initial Inspiration and Opportunity Exploration

Before Search: Users may not know what kind of food they want to eat nor what certain issues they might face when looking at restaurant information.
During Search: Lack of detailed information about restaurants, eg. parking, reservations, waiting time, menu price, food images, honest reviews, and diet restrictions.
Lack of customized information (too much information, too overwhelmed)
After Search: How to encourage users to leave real reviews or posts to be more involved in this system.
The system didn’t learn much from prior users’ behaviors and improved customized recommendations and user interface.

Problems

Before Search:
- Help users to build a profile to learn more about users’ eating habits.
- Build a main page with customized recommendation restaurants
- Create more user-related inspirations key keywords or lists to look through in the search bar
During Search:
- Build the interface with customized and clustered information to meet the users’ prioritized needs.
- Show users search-related posts/reviews/restaurants/dishes/detailed info like parking, reservation, waiting time, etc.
After Search
- Design an incentive system to encourage users to more likely and easily leave reviews and participate under the posts from other users.

Design Goals

Personalized Recommendations: Implement a recommendation system that uses machine learning algorithms to suggest restaurants, cafes, and dishes based on users' preferences, location, and previous reviews. Personalized recommendations can enhance user engagement and improve the overall user experience.
Food Discovery: Include features that help users discover new restaurants, trending cuisines, unique dishes, or hidden gems in their area. Curated lists, popular dishes, and local recommendations can assist users in exploring a diverse range of food options.
Social Integration: Incorporate social media integration to enable users to share their reviews and experiences on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This can increase app visibility and attract new users.

Opportunities

Research from User Reviews & Target User Demographic

We extensively reviewed user feedback across platforms to understand specific likes and dislikes regarding popular food review apps. This analysis aimed to uncover users' experiences and identify potential pain points they encounter while using these applications.

User Persona

Food Tour

Solutions & Ideations

Food Recommendations

Restaurant Information

Reward System

Key Features

The Social Media that all about FOOD!

Smart Searching System

Customizable Info Board

Provide a platform where users can do an in-depth comparison between multiple restaurants and their dishes and then give their recommendations/experiences.

Customized food recommendations based on users’ past preferences. Additionally, provide promotions/deals that other platforms may have such as from Doordash or Grubhub.

Give a detailed and complete overview of restaurants such as how reservations should be made, where parking can be found, and reviews from others with similar tastes as the user.

Give out some kind of monetary rewards for reliable users that write detailed reviews and can reliably provide up to date information about restaurants in their area