TRYING A TASTE OF ETHNIC CULTURE WITH A TAP ON YOUR PHONE

Bringing Filipino Flavors to you with Bahay Ng Joni

Duration:  4 week sprint
Role: UX Research, Prototype, and Design
Methods Applied: Persona, Usability Testing, Comparative Analysis, Wireframing, User Flows, and Site Mapping
Programs Used: Figma, Whimsical

For my Passion Project, I decided to choose my cousin’s food delivery business that you can order online and have them delivered to you. She posts pictures of her Filipino-derived creations on Facebook and only introduces new dishes as a post. She doesn’t have an actual working site that she can categorize her items by appetizer, entree, or dessert.

I felt that during the COVID-19 pandemic where many small, independent, ethnic restaurants are closed because of no walk-in customers, I could do my cousin a favor and create a mobile application that users can select a Filipino dish, choose to order it individually or in a party tray, and lastly have it delivered to the user’s door using a selected carrier.  

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

I looked at other Filipino restaurant websites to see what pain points I can find so I can make my version better. Here are some of the pain points I noticed as I was looking at the following sites:

• NICK’S ON GRAND
  When you click on “menu” on its homepage, all you can see are images of the vegan-based Filipino dishes they serve. Even though the images are mouth-watering, the menu shows no names of the item, no prices of individual or party tray options, and no ingredients.

• LOS KUYAS
  Its site shows images of the food, name, price, and ingredients but when you click on “order now”, it will not take you to another page where you can place an order, have the option to carry the food out to you curbside, or pick the food up yourself.

• SENOR SISIG
  When you click on the menu, the spacing between the name of the item, image, and its ingredients are too far from each other that it’s hard to associate either one since these items are stacked on top of each other. There is no price associated with their items either

A TASTE OF MANILA FROM THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

After reviewing the competitor sites and formulating the groundwork of what my app will be, I had to first tailor my app to certain users who want their Filipino food fresh and delivered to their door without any agitation on having it come out cold when it comes to the door.

PERSONA DEFINED

Here are the scenarios I came up with when users use my app:

• The user can find an item classified by entree, appetizer, or dessert throughout the menu

• You can choose whether to purchase the item in an individual plate or a party tray based on how many people you intend to feed

• You get to choose which food delivery carrier will deliver the order based on price and the estimated time of arrival (ex: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub).

HAVING JONI TO KEEP YOU HUNGRY AND SAVE YOUR PARTY

I tried my app on a couple of people and instructed them to purchase a certain appetizer, entree, and what is the fastest and cost-effective carrier to deliver food to the user. Many of them said the following:

I then showed the prototype to my cousin and she complemented that my user flow and the visual ease of ordering her edible masterpieces on your mobile phone was clean and wished she could use this app to fulfill her orders and expand her business. She suggested that to ensure the user’s food is on its way, if there was some sort of tracking bar or alerts via text that let’s the user know how long the food will get to the user, it can assure the customer the food will be delivered in the estimated time the app stated.

FAMILY IS EVERYTHING, IT’S THE CORE OF FILIPINO CULTURE

Doing this project made me realize how much closer I am with my family since I proposed an idea that can help bring business for my cousin. I felt like I was expanding her delectable dishes to a wider base and making the order processing a lot easier through the app instead of being flooded with requests on her Facebook messenger box or text.

Family is the focal point of the Filipino culture and they bring their expertise and skills to ensure they fulfill the American dream to share their culture to a more diverse audience and respect each other through shared cultural values.