Creating a Food Truck App for Folks on the Go

The Flyin’ Taco is a local food truck in the suburbs of a metropolitan area. They strive to serve healthy and delicious Mexican street food to commuters and workers who lack the time or ability to prepare a family dinner.  In this mock project I created an app for The Flyin’ Taco Food Truck that allows users to locate, order, customize, and earn rewards for their meal.

The Project

Roles

Tools

Collaborators


User Research

To start this project off, I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was busy families with picky eaters and lots of after-school activities.

This user group confirmed initial assumptions about Flyin’ Taco customers, but research also revealed that picky children aren’t the only factor limiting users from going to any restaurant in town. Concerns such as specialty diets ranging from gluten-intolerant to vegan as well as general health awareness made it necessary to be able to see the menu and customization options beforehand. 


Initial Designs

After my initial research I began iterating some designs through paper wireframing. Once I had a better idea of the layout that worked will I moved on to digital wireframes. As the initial design phase continued, I made sure to consider user feedback and findings from the research phase in all design decisions.

Once wireframing was complete, I created a low-fidelity prototype which connected the primary user flow of locating and ordering food. This prototype was used in a usability study with real users.


User Testing

The results of user testing were two main changes to the design. The first was that some users wanted to be able to choose a time for later that they wanted to pickup their food order. In order to accommodate this I added a tab option between pickup ASAP and Schedule which would allow users to pick up an order as soon as possible or set a date and time for pickup later.

The second change was the addition of dietary restriction information on the user profile. A unique offering of this app is the “Spin the Wheel” feature which chooses a random menu item for the user to order if they are indecisive. Most users thought this function was great but those with dietary restrictions were frustrated by the feature choosing options they could not enjoy. This new feature allows users to change the types of foods they are shown and eliminates this problem.


Final Designs

After a second round of user feedback I created the final designs which featured a cleaner, clearer user flow, scheduling options, and more customization options.

If this project were to continue, I’d like to conduct a 3rd round of user testing with the more finalized designs to determine if there are any additional changes needed before it is ready to development. Once the app is developed it would be beneficial to continue tracking how users interact with that app and making any updates deemed necessary.