As a student at San Diego City College, I’ve observed a campus-wide problem over the past two years. Our food court has been closed and under renovation for over three years now. In the meantime, students have very limited access to food that is either overpriced or unhealthy.
My teammate and I worked collaboratively in every stage of the process, including user research, UX design, and visual design.
Additionally, I was responsible for sketching paper wireframes and prototyping them, writing test scripts for user testing, and designing the logo. I also worked on the visual design of the main product pages, filter screen, and confirmation screens.
Product design, logo design
My teammate and I applied IDEO’s human-centered design process to find an innovative solution to this problem.
We designed CampusEats, a meal delivery app that partners with local grocery stores to provide more affordable, more varied, and healthier food options for students.
Jump to PrototypeIn order to design a successful solution, we conducted in-depth research to better understand the problem, gain insights, and learn from people’s needs and motivations.
We conducted interviews with students from San Diego City College, spoke with a nutritionist to learn about the importance of healthy food, and visited the Emergency Food Pantry to see how they help students in need. I also conducted ethnographic research at Mesa Commons, the new food court at Mesa College, to see how students’ needs are met.
After conducting research, my teammate and I converged to share our findings and make sense of our research. We put key information into Post-its, revisited our notes, mentioned key learnings, and shared inspiring stories from people.
Then, we clustered similar Post-its together and created an affinity map. We found three themes and discovered three insights within each theme.
The themes and insights from our research helped identify opportunities for design. We engaged in rapid brainstorming to find innovative solutions that focused on the three “how might we” questions and themes we developed: affordable, healthy, and fast for students.
After the ideation session, we came up with CampusEats, a meal delivery app in which students can order a variety of healthy and affordable food from nearby grocery stores. Before lunch time, a student volunteer does a mass pickup and delivery straight to campus so that other students don’t have to spend time going out to get food.
We modeled CampusEats after meal delivery apps like UberEats and GrubHub. We also took analogous inspiration from India’s food delivery system in which homemade lunches are prepared and mass delivered by families directly to business sites.
We discovered a lot about students’ needs during our initial research. These insights really helped us arrive at our final solution. By doing user research, we were able to identify the problem areas to solve.
By testing ideas early on, we were able to hone in on a strong concept. Conducting multiple rounds of user testing helped us better design the app for our users. There were a lot of small details that we improved based on students’ feedback.