Spoon: Dating App for Food Lovers
Process Guide
What does it do?
There are a lot of dating apps where we can meet people today. But a common complaint several people have, as convenient as they may be is this: The magic of meeting someone in real life is gone...
Another common complaint we noticed was picking the perfect first date restaurant- finding one with good food and a great atmosphere for conversation.
So we thought, why not combine the two concerns.
How about- we select restaurants around their city where our lovelorn folks can go enjoy food and meet new people. The speciality? Everyone there has come through the app and hence, everyone around is single and looking for someone!
It is a singles cruise without the pressure and if you don't like anyone- you will love the food at the very least!
DESIGN PROCESS:
Turn around time: 1 week
Team Capacity: 3 people
Role: Ideation Lead, Research Lead
Methods: field scan/competitor review, qualitative analysis, user personas, storyboarding, low and high fidelity prototypes, usability testing
Software: Miro, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Project goals: Connecting people through food - connecting people in person.
"How might we create an app to connect with your soulmate through great food?"
IDEAS:
1. Dating app based on food preferences (rejected)
2. Dating app for vegans/vegetarians (exists)
3. Dating app that will allow people to meet irl in restaurants chosen for them (selected)
RESEARCH
Research Methods:
Literature Research 2. Field Scan Review
Our research process included a brief literature scan, a field scan and reviewing inputs from app reviews of our field scan.
Since our turnaround time was extremely quick- we derived insights from pre-existing data.
LITERATURE RESEARCH INSIGHTS
We drafted some insights from Dating apps: A literature review (Wu, Trottier 2022). Along with this, we also scanned google scholar for other relevant research literature pertaining dating challenges of people. While safety was the biggest concern, it was something we did not have the capacity to explore. Some other important paradigms of dating challenges were as follows:
1. Meet a new person
3.Need a place to meet naturally
4. Efficient dating: Not wasting time
Find restaurants and view reviews
Make reservations for restaurants
Filter restaurants by price and location
FIELD SCAN/COMPETITOR REVIEW
Offline dating app
Only live for 24 hours
Only live on Thursday
Online dating app
Tracking and matching based on location
Swipe features for ease of use
DEVELOPMENT
USER PERSONAS
Based on research insights we crafted these user personas. The personas helped with empathy building since we were unable to do user interviews.
In addition to dating app users, our personas include a business owner. While the app strictly caters to people looking for a mate, we believed it to be important to include business owners who we would be collaborating with
STORYBOARDING
In order to map out user journey, motivations, and expectations, we included storyboarding as part of our process.
PROTOTYPING
LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Before venturing into a digital figma prototype, we created lo-fi paper prototypes in order to visualize user journeys. We tested these paper prototypes on friends (due to time constraints)
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Based on insights from our lo-fi run-through, we were able to work out kinks, and reiterate our design to accommodate feedback. Following this, we created our digital prototype: