K-Bop - Mobile App

Challenge: Adults don’t have the time or energy to cook after work and/or school and need a way to order food ahead of time remotely

The product: K-Bop is a Korean-inspired restaurant located in St. Louis, MO. Their focus is to provide fast and tasty street bowls

Target audience: Consumers who don’t have the time to cook dinner after work or school - the age range is pretty wide, 18+

Project goal: Create a user friendly app for K-Bop customers to place orders.

My role & responsibilities: UX researcher and designer for the app and website from conception to delivery. This included user research and interviews, digital wireframing, low and high fidelity prototyping, and usability testing.

Research

I conducted interviews to better understand my user base, their problems and needs. The four major pain points I identified were:

1. busy schedules

2. lack of customization

3. inaccurate wait times

4. order mistakes

One of the major user groups identified during my research were young adults who have busy schedules and are too tired to cook after work and/or school, which is shown in the user persona below.

I also completed a user journey map for the persona, Tory. The biggest takeaway from this user journey map is to create an app that makes the ordering and pick-up/delivery process as efficient and accurate as possible.

Initial Designs - paper wireframes

Here are some first draft wireframes of potential ‘Order Status’ screens. I chose to focus on a few features that will solve the user pain points. The order tracking will help let the user know when their order is ready and includes a step to help prevent order mistakes.

Initial Designs - digital wireframes

Usability Study Results

I completed an unmoderated, remote usability study to test my lo-fi designs and prototype.

During my usability study, users asked if there was a way to add more items to their cart. In the first version, the user flow takes you straight to Review Order after adding the first item. I added an 'Add More Items' option to resolve this.

In my early mockups, I created a non-working drop down for Order Type. During my usability study, users were confused on if they could select delivery instead of pick-up. In my revised version, I remove the drop-down and make it clear that pick-up is the only option.

Final Mockups

The final mockups address the previously mentioned user needs and more i.e. being able to view what's in the cart before purchasing. The prototype is here.

Conclusion

Impact: This app gives users a way to place orders remotely and makes it clear that user needs are important to K-Bop. One of the usability study participants said: “This looks and feels exactly like a real app, I almost thought I was actually placing an order! There is nothing I would change about it.”

What I learned: Throughout this project, I realized how important it was to focus on user needs and not just the app design. As a graphic designer, it's easy to want to make decisions based on looks, but the user need is the whole intention behind the app.