Crafting a healthy dining out experience

Problem

Hong Kong people spend a considerable time on dining out, mostly owing to the fast tempo of life and tight schedule. Hong Kong people can’t enjoy end-to-end dining out experience unless they download multiple apps in the food category. Despite the effort, their need for a healthy diet remains unaddressed.

Design Challenge

How could we address the need of a healthy dining out experience?

Research: Customer & Competitor Analysis

As mobile Internet becomes more reachable, customer behavior patterns are increasingly dependent on mobile app devices. According to research conducted by Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2016, Hong Kong people dine out 4.2 days per week, with 27.3% of the respondents dining out every day. In the Hong Kong market, openrice, groupon, and foodpanda are three major mobile apps in the food category, each with a different focus on the overall dining experiences.

In addition, several studies have identified Hong Kong people’s growing need for a healthy diet. However, an overwhelming majority of the respondents also acknowledge that it’s relatively difficult to find out what foods would be the healthier options when dining out.

This gap inspired us to design a mobile app with a special focus on a healthy diet meanwhile offering integrated functionality. Naturally, our target audience group is Hong Kong people who look for convenient and healthy dining out experience.

Ideation

What we want is an app that could solve the problems, but also an app that people would actually use. Since the market had been dominated by the three apps, we must come up with features that are good enough for users to be willing to pay the switching cost, and thus began our ideation process.

I. Discount, rating, payment & delivery — all in one app

The first ideation came naturally. Prevailing apps in the food category couldn’t provide end-to-end services. Therefore, we decided to design an app that integrated the functions of rating, discount, and delivery, saving users the trouble of switching between different apps.

II. To cope with busy schedule – Scan the menu during your walk

After observing and joining people’s walk on the street, I discovered one major pain point: for people touring or shopping, they usually don’t spend much time filtering restaurants on apps. But if they enter a restaurant that they don’t like, it will be embarrassing for them to leave.

We then incorporated augmented reality (AR) technology to solve this problem. Users could scan the signboard of one restaurant and get the electronic menu on their phones.

III. Healthy diet — where could we intervene?

The real challenge was to address the issue of a healthy diet within the scope of dining out service. We almost pivoted and diverged to the category of healthy recipe/cooking guide and calorie counter app. Then, in a meeting, when I was discussing the function of signboard-scanning with my team, I realized that similar technology could be leveraged for nutrition information.

Although some restaurants have included calorie information on the menu, such a technique is far from popularization. With the aid of image recognition technology and supporting databases, our app allows users to simply scan the food and find out calorie information. Users could also scan the menu and the app will capture and identify food names. After linking them to the food types through natural language processing, the app would display nutrition information.

Reflection

This was the very first design project I did at the University of Hong Kong. It was the class that exposes me to the world of mobile app design. I learned so much about information technology through this course and got inspired by a new clear-cut career goal: to become a UX designer.

If I have more time, I’d take this product to the stages of usability testing and iteration. Though it was already well-received by my classmates whose backgrounds were all over the place, I still want to iterate more. More importantly, I would take this class earlier so I could do more exciting projects in my undergraduate study.