Visualizing food exploring and sharing experience

“What should I eat today?” and “Where should we go to eat?” are everyday questions with surprisingly few quick, visual answers. While eating is a universal need, there’s no seamless way to find food inspiration or discover restaurants on the go.

On platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, food content is everywhere—users often see a dish or restaurant and instantly think, “I want to try that!” At the same time, people love capturing food photos and videos, but most of this content ends up buried in camera rolls or fleeting stories.

Foodies bridges this gap—a platform where users can share visual food moments, get inspired by real experiences, and discover or book restaurants directly through content.

I started this project with a series of research processes:

User Interviews: I created an interview protocol to ask potential users. The high-level goals of this study were:

• To understand user needs when exploring food and restaurants.
• To identify desirable and lacking features in current competitors.
• To determine if users need a more visualized application for exploring food and restaurants, and if so, how they currently address this need—what tools and processes they use.

Affinity Diagramming: Based on interviews with four potential users, I created sticky notes for each participant and organized them into groups based on their relationships. This process led to the functional requirements for Foodies.

Competitive Analysis: I divided the competitive landscape into four categories: Maps, Business Reviews, Restaurant Booking, Social Media

Based on my research, I began the ideation process and identified three system goals to address the pain points in the current competitive landscape:

1. Explore restaurants by browsing through a photo stream.
2. Explore food by swiping through a full-screen video stream.
3. View restaurant details and reserve a time.

I also created personas, scenarios, information architecture, and task flows before moving on to the design phase.

I created interactive prototypes from the wireframes.

With the prototypes, I conducted a usability test to understand:

• Does the app meet the needs of its target users when it comes to finding food and restaurants?
• What problems do users encounter when trying to explore food and restaurants using the app?

Each test was divided into four parts:

1. Pre-Test Interview
2. Tasks
3. Post-Questionnaires
4. Debriefing

Key Findings:

• Participants found the app visually appealing and easy to navigate.
• Participants appreciated the restaurant recommendations and suggested adding more filtering options for search.
• Participants found the current sharing task flow inefficient and suggested adding in-app sharing and messaging features.

Next Steps:

• Improve the sorting and filtering options to enhance the user experience.
• Consider adding more sharing options, such as an in-app messaging feature that allows users to share posts and chat directly.
• Current designs focus on content consumption task flows, such as browsing and interacting with content and viewing restaurant details. The next design phase will shift towards content generation task flows, including taking and uploading photos and videos, writing reviews, and managing personal profiles.