Hilsha

Since I followed "Design Thinking" framework, I started things off by interviewing 6 people in Toronto who have migrated from Bangladesh. At the beginning of this project, I was un-sure with what route to take. So, I used these interviews to gather basic insights about anything and everything about their food habit and identify common painpoints. Then I used few UX tools i.e. empathy map, persona, user jourey mapping to define the problem statement and also used those in the ideation phase to come up with solutions.

Based on the interview, I found 2 persona - Fahrina & Rashid. Both of them miss their ethnic Bangladeshi food and have their reasons for not being able to cook those. But Fahrina relies on some local caterers who cooks & sells ethnic Bangladeshi comfort food from their home, and Rashid relies on local Bangladeshi Restaurant. I felt painpoints related to ordering food from caterers is rather more unexplored by existing products in the market. So, I decided to narrow down my focus on the user group like fahrina.

To dig deeper into the user needs, I mapped the journey of Fahrina when her goal is to - order ethnic Bangladeshi comfort food from local caterers for a get together at her place.

After digging into the empathy map, persona, user journey mapping, user stories and their painpoints, I came up with the following problem, hypothesis and goal statement:

From the user interview, I got to know that the caterers from whom the Bangladeshi immigrants sourced ethnic Bangladeshi food does not have a individual website/app.They mostly sells their food via word of mouth and marketplace, community groups, pages in Facebook. So I decided to explore some of these caterers in Facebook community groups and pages. I also explored the website and facebook page of the restaurants who serves ethnic Bangladeshi food in Toronto. Combining these insights with the ones I got from the user interviews I came up with a value proposition for my product. My goal was to come up with as many ideas as possible.

For MVP, I started with a use case where user will browse caterers, see their menu details and place order. For designing low-fidelity wireframe, I jumped right into sketching with pen and paper. I came up with 5 different version of wireframe for each screens which I subsequently filtered and summarized into a final version.

Later, I transformed the final version of the paper wireframe into a digital wireframe and made a low-fidelity prototype using Figma.

Click to open the low-fidelity prototype in a new tab

I conducted the usability test of my low-fidelity prototype with 2 of participants that I interviewed before. Both of them have previous experience of ordering Bangladeshi ethnic food from the local caterers of Toronto. I asked them to perform few basic use cases and also some questions like:

• 1. What do you see in each screen and what you understand by those?
• 2. What do you like and don't like about it?
• 3. Do you have any suggestion?

From the test, I found the following major insights:

• 1. The Home screen displays list of caterers including their availability. But this availability varies a lot from one caterer to other. Instead of seeing the list of all caterers, what if users want to see those who is available for today/ tomorrow or next 4-7 days? In this case, users have to click/explore every caterer which will make the experience cumbersome. As a solution, I came up with a idea where the home screen will initially display caterers who is avaialble for next 3 days. Users will also have the liberty to change it from 3 days to the time frame they want.
• 2. After adding item to the cart (screen 2), user clicks "Checkout" button in screen 3 to proceed. But what if user does not want to checkout with the item he has selected in the cart? What if they want to change the item in the cart and start browsing again? As a solution, I came up with a additional screen called where user can view and edit their cart.

After incorporating the insights from usability study and visual design elements i.e. icons, colors, typography and containment, I came up with the hi-fidelity prototype.

This project made me realize more and more about the importance of understanding the user and how much it can impact and guide in each steps of UX design process. I would like to thank Google for making amazing content in it's "UX Design Certification" which helped me a lot to hone my skills in building the UX tools I used to understand my users.