To obtain my UX Certification from General Assembly, I had to conceptualize, design, test, and prototype an app.

My group of 7 friends and I have a monthly dinner club and we were struggling to choose restaurants we had not all been to. Although we live in a major city, the entire restaurant discovery process is overwhelming due to so many choices. It’s also a frustrating user experience because there are three apps to book restaurants on so you have to check all three for availability.
So my original app wanted to solve for these three major problems:

My Original Concept

I conducted user interviews with a wide range of restaurant goers: different ages, cities, and frequent restaurant app users. My questions focused on restaurant discovery, the reservation process, and how they get and give recommendations.
You can view my interview questions here:
Interview Guide

I then combined similar answers and grouped them into categories and tried to find common themes.
Social media was an unexpected prominent theme.

I then did a feature inventory comparison between the other restaurant apps that my interviewees said they used the most: OpenTable, Yelp, Resy, and Tock. I also compared their pluses and deltas and noticed there were a lot of similar features across all apps. However, not one app had everything and none were intuitive: they all would recommend the same restaurants, even if you have already eaten at them. This did confirm there is a need for an app that combines all of the good features but also caused me to pivot and reduce my scope to create something that fills a gap in the market.

I went back and looked for similar patterns in my user interviews. Some quotes I heard multiple times:

I decided to revise my original concept and reduce the scope to only focus on the social and tracking aspect. My new concept focused on 2 different experiences that would then create one social restaurant community:

I then created a user persona for a frequent restaurant goer in a big city with lots of options. This persona:
• Gets recommendations from social media and word of mouth
• Wants to discover new places that have similar characteristics to places she knows she already likes
• Wants to track places she’s been and what she ordered
• Wants to keep a list of places she would like to try

I also mapped out a user flow of logging a restaurant they visited since this would be the main action they would be taking in the app. I wanted to make the path simple since users will have to do this often and the more they go through this flow, the more personalized their experience using the app will be

I then started sketching some very preliminary ideas of how to get users into the search funnel which would be the main flow I would be building out in Figma for this project.

I then did some more detailed sketches of what I envisioned the above user flow to look like. I made a conscious effort to not overload the user with information like competitor apps do since they would still use those other apps to do things like find out restaurant info, and book reservations. I wanted the focus here to be logging a restaurant.

I then created a low-fi prototype in Figma of this funnel and tested it with 3 users as I talked them through what I wanted them to log. Overall it was successful in terms of functionality but users were not clearly seeing the vision due to the lack of detail. This was my first ever prototype in Figma so not knowing how to use components made the prototype seem glitchy.

You can view the low-fi prototype here

As I learned how to use Figma components and improved my prototyping skills tenfold, I also worked on a mini style guide and chose my fonts, colors, logo, and app name: FavorEats

I ended up building out more screens than required for this project because I was having so much fun.
In this video you will see the homescreen, a user going through the search flow, marking a restaurant they want to visit, adding information for a restaurant they did visit, and what a potential profile page could look like.

Here is a link to the prototype if you'd like to click through yourself

Although my class is over, I would like to continue iterating on this prototype and building out all screens and user flows. While user testing my final prototype, I got so much positive feedback that people would use an app like this that I may have to develop this into a real app in the near future…stay tuned :)

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