The Problem: Restaurant-goers often have no way of knowing about every ingredient that goes into their food. This can be a safety issue for people with severe food allergies or diet restrictions.

The Solution: Design an app that allows users to search menu items specific to their choice of restaurant. My Eat Smart App contains a searchable database of popular restaurants and a detailed, up-to-date list of the ingredients used in each menu item. It also provides nutrition information, and will be an invaluable tool for users with food allergies, diet restrictions, or product preferences.

Project Duration: May 2023-August 2023

My Role: UX Designer designing an original restaurant item ingredient database app from conception to delivery.

My Responsibilities: Conducting interviews, creating personas, paper and digital wireframing, low- and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting and moderating usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.

I designed this app keeping in mind that not all users are equally adept at technology. I kept the user flow as simple and intuitive as possible to make it highly accessible to my target audience of users aged 8 - 108 years old. I even included a tutorial in the prototype for users with learning disabilities!

One challenge I faced early on was determining the best user interface and overall layout of the app, to ensure the most accessibility for users with cognitive difficulties. I overcame this challenge by sketching a layout that had large button sizes, in addition to adding WCAG-compliant colors to the UI later on in the process.

Usability testing revealed three key oversights:

- The navigation was not made entirely clear

- The “Home” button was in a counterintuitive spot

- The entire user flow lacked a “Back” button

- The color scheme initially was not WCAG-compliant

With these insights in mind, I went back to wireframing and restructuring my UI to better resolve the user pain points.

After refining the design to resolve user pain points, I adjusted a few finer details of my UI and transitions within the user flow. What resulted was a smooth high-fidelity prototype that felt like a real, polished app!

Next steps for this project would include partnering with app developers to create the final product, as well as with a number of popular restaurants who would be willing to add their menu item ingredients to the app’s database. Another round of real-world testing would determine the app’s overall applicability.