International Institute of St. Louis
Re-Thinking Pop-Up Dinners
Founded in 1919, the International Institute of St. Louis (IISTL) helps build a more connected and productive society for immigrants, their families, and the St. Louis community.
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Nearly 1000 volunteers and 90 staff members offer English and citizenship classes, career path assistance, job placement, and couseling, as well as small-business development and microloans.
Challenge
IISTL is helping immigrant - refugee - owned catering companies find a new source of business.
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It organizes a new program - Wednesday Night Dinners for curbside pickup every week, which has been very popular with lines forming and food selling out.
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IISTL wants to improve this new addition to their programming so that it becomes a sustainable and accessible form of support.
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Our goal was to create an app, based off the current website structure, that would provide mobile access to information regarding the events.
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Users could purchase meals online for the Wednesday Night Pop-up Dinners when away from their desktop and receive notifications of upcoming events.
Research & Synthesis
Team:
Chip Auchincloss, UX Researcher
Colleen Chin, UX Researcher
Tia Thomas, UX Researcher
Duration:
2 week Sprint for
Student Project
Tools:
Sketch, Miro
Methods:
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User Interviews
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Affinity Map
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Persona
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Problem Statement
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User Flow
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Site Map
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Digital Wireframing
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High-Fidelity Prototype
User Interviews
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Have you ever been to a food festival? What was your experience?
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Could you share with us your food pickup experiences during Covid?
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What is your experience with food pop-up service?
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What informs your decision about finding new cuisines to try?
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What issues have you had with food pick-up and ordering?
Click image to enlarge
We began our research by conducting user interviews with six participants to determine what people's experiences were with food pick-up service, food festivals and pop-ups. We organized our data in an affinity map to understand people's pain points and needs. As a result, we discovered:
Pain Points:
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Overall disorganization
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Service not streamlined
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Very crowded
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Not enough food
Likes:
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Convenience
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Variety of menu options
Needs:
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Pay ahead of time
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Receive notifications
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Ability to check in on an app
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Limited human interaction
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Ticketing system
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To know calender ahead of time
Persona
Problem Statement
Rick needs an organized way to know about details on Wednesday Night Pop-Up Dinners because he wants to support local eateries and to try new cuisines but doesn’t have all of the information he needs to participate with confidence.
How might we give people all the information that they need to feel confident about participating in Wednesday Night Pop-Up Dinners?
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How might we best support local eateries for International Institute of St. Louis?
User Flow
Click image to enlarge
Once we determine the direction of our design solution for our app, we built a user flow to determine how someone would go through the process of signing up for the Wednesday Night Pop-Up Dinners, as well as being able to get catering information and receive notifications.
Site Map
Click image to enlarge
Our site map of the mobile app laid out the features that we focused on in our final prototype.
Wireframing
These are the initial wireframes we developed, from hand sketches to digital mid/high fidelity.
Usability Testing
Once our initial prototype was created, we conducted usability testing with four participants to determine whether our design solution solved user pain points.
Main Takeaways:
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Too much unnecessary text
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Users clicked on "date" (text) on food event page instead of "View Menu" button
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Overcrowding text
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When removing an item from bag, users clicked "+/-" button instead of "Remove" button
Results of the testing suggested making the following changes:
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Incorporating social media icon buttons on the login page
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Creating multiple ways for the users to edit items in the shopping bag
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Making the overall look less crowded
Final Stylization
Prototype
Here is the final clickable prototype that we created in Sketch.
Steps of the prototype are as follows:
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Log In
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Browse Landing Page
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Go to Events Tab
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Select Pop-Up Dinners
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Choose Current Week or Future Week Menus
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Ability to set up Notifications for future events
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Browse menus
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Learn about caterers
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Selecting menu options
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Adding item to bag
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Checkout process
Key Learnings & Next Steps
As a result of this project, we recognized the need for users to have an organized way to find out about events offered by International Institute of St. Louis and give users all of the information they need to participate with confidence.
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Our next steps would be to expand the app service to be a responsive web version in order to have services accessible on multiple platforms.
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