Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service by Tianyi Qi is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2022 Bronze A' Design Award in Mobile Technologies, Applications and Software Design Competition Category.
BronzeMobile· 2022
Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service
by Tianyi Qi
Client: Tianyi Qi
Bronze A' Design Award Winner in Mobile Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #136763The Design
About Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service
Foodie is a mobile application designed to help people find restaurants through recommendations from friends. Sharing food preferences usually happens in offline conversations, and Foodie moves the exchange onto a digital platform for use at any time and in any place. The Friends screen shows updates and lists created by friends. The My Lists screen allows users to manage saved restaurants and to filter them by type. The Map screen supports searching for restaurants nearby or around a chosen location. Foodie is built for iOS devices.
The Recognition
About the Bronze A' Design Award
Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service is a Bronze A' Design Award winner, a highly prestigious recognition granted to outstanding designs distinguished by creativity, ingenuity, and astuteness. Bronze winners are amply skillful and strikingly creative artifacts that authenticate the vast experience, imagination, and resourcefulness of their designers. Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished object that is notably professional and innovative. This Bronze A' Design Award-winning design incorporates best practices in art, science, design, and technology, and is excellent for its attention to detail. Foodie Restaurant Recommendation Service splendidly satisfies needs, touches desires, charms feelings, and appeals to curiosity.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
Leveraging an existing way people use to find good restaurants and services to a digital platform. Social media was a rocketing trend, but very few products were able to keep users engaged. Their failure was the result of designing based on assumptive user needs. The design of Foodie is grounded in solid user demands, and technology is used to solve problems that the current ways of interaction have, instead of merely creating a new way for people to interact.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
My main focus has been identifying user pain points and using design to solve these problems. I talked to a lot of target users, listening to how they currently find restaurants and what they are frustrated about. For example, one insight I learned was that they trust recommendations from their friends, but they can't always get these recommendations when they need them, like, on the street. As a solution to the problem, I designed the map function to let users find restaurants anytime, anywhere. Ultimately, my goal was to design an application that really solves user problems.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
I am planning to keep exploring the socialization aspect of the app. The app is aimed to achieve two goals: helping users find good restaurants and building more connections with other people. The former has been addressed pretty well by the current design, but the latter still needs more effort. In my future plans, the app will allow users to explore more people to connect based on their tastes, as well as reward new connections they make.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Foodie is a mobile app that aims to leverage the action of sharing personal preference with one's social circle, which happens mostly in offline settings, to a digital platform. This transformation allows this information-sharing process to expand beyond limited scenarios so users can create content and access information whenever and wherever they need it.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The app is designed for iOS systems.
- Tags
- Social, Restaurant, Food, Application, Recommendation
- Production Technology
- The app requires a strong search engine, map and navigation service, and restaurant database to be functional.
- Design Challenge
- Why do users use this service when there are already other popular information sources/services existing around? Which was the major challenge I was facing at the beginning stage of the project. The research was designed and planned to answer this question.
- Research
- I interviewed 10 participants between 20–40, all of them are Yelp or Google users. Participants were asked to arrange the cards with information sources to show how frequently they use and how much they trust each of them. The 3 major research questions are:
1. How and when do people use each information source to find restaurants?
2. What do people trust about each information source?
3. How do people recommend restaurants to their social circle?
The results showed that social circle is the most trusted and the 2nd most used information source when participants are looking for restaurant recommendations. This insight validated the foundation of the project: even though modern technologies have played an important role in helping people find restaurants, people still get recommendations from their friends. From the research, I also learned the requirements participants have on a restaurant's recommendation service and the data gathered from the research was used in persona creation. - Inspiration
- As a foodie living in New York City, I have been enjoying using apps like Yelp and Google to find restaurants, especially those that provide ethnic food that I have never tried before. However, I noticed that even though those apps are backed with big data, I trust my friends more in terms of finding restaurants. This experience makes me curious about this totally different mechanism of trust: How might we help people find restaurants from their friends' recommendations?
- Project Duration
- The project started in August 2019 and finished in January 2020, in New York City.
- Operation Flow
- On the "Friends" screen, a user will see new updates from their friends, for example, a friend added a new restaurant to their list. They can also explore all the lists created by their friends. To manage restaurants on their own lists, a user can easily navigate to the "My Lists" screen. They can use the filters to easily find the specific types of restaurants on their lists. On the "Map" screen, a user can search for restaurants nearby or around a certain location.
- Image Credits
- Image #1-5: Tianyi Qi
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