Terrier Tastes
UI/UX Brand Identity Sustainability
Spring 2023 | BU Spark! Innovation Fellowship
Role: UX Design Lead
Team: 3 developers, 1 designer
Tools: Figma, Miro, Jira, Adobe Illustrator
Terrier Taste aims to help BU students reduce of food waste generated by BU Dining Hall services. By providing users with a tool that will help them rate, comment, and review menu items, our platform helps students make more informed choices at the dining hall, which will reduce unnecessary food waste.
We are thrilled to announce that following our exciting Demo Day win for Judge’s Choice Innovation Award, our app has now launched on the App Store and Google Play!
Role: UX Design Lead
Team: 3 developers, 1 designer
Tools: Figma, Miro, Jira, Adobe Illustrator
Terrier Taste aims to help BU students reduce of food waste generated by BU Dining Hall services. By providing users with a tool that will help them rate, comment, and review menu items, our platform helps students make more informed choices at the dining hall, which will reduce unnecessary food waste.
We are thrilled to announce that following our exciting Demo Day win for Judge’s Choice Innovation Award, our app has now launched on the App Store and Google Play!
︎ Download on AppStore
︎ Download on Google Play
Highlights
Don’t waste a bite.
Don’t waste a bite.
Choose right.
Explore the core features of Terrier Tastes ︎︎︎
Watch the Demo!
Tackling the Challenge
Who is Terrier Tastes for?
Defining Users
After determining our problem and testing our hypothesis to validate it, our team spent time together on Miro to understand our target users through several stages of research such as:
Narrowing down the job map ︎︎︎ Analyzing pain and gain points︎︎︎ Listing user priority items ︎︎︎ Determining user stories ︎︎︎Crafting a user persona
After these exercises, we defined that our taget users are
BU students who are: 1. Not satisfied with dining hall food 2. Want to lessen food waste 3. Have no efficient way of giving feedback
Solution Validation
Based on this, we validated our new solution method of creating a review platform through a qualtrics survey on BU Reddit page where it resulted in 66% of participants responding that they are interested in a new technology to help food waste.
Based on this, we validated our new solution method of creating a review platform through a qualtrics survey on BU Reddit page where it resulted in 66% of participants responding that they are interested in a new technology to help food waste.
Our Solution
A Food Rating App 🥐️
With inspiration from apps like yelp. Reddit, and rate my professor, often used by students to get other’s insight for better experiences, we came up with Terrier Tastes!
To determine an efficient flow of the app, our team created a user flow of a student who wants to see reviews of other students to have a better idea of what to eat at the dining hall. This informed rounds of lo-fi wireframes.
Wireframing
During the weeks, I created lo-fi wireframes in order to communicate with the developers to determine if a flow is difficult to use or follows our job map well, allowing more efficient work for all teammates. I was able to implement different versions of a feature quickly. These wireframes were also used to get feedback during usability test interviews.
Usability Test Interviews
At each stage of implementing new features to our design and developing stages, we conducted 10 usability tests with BU students with a dining plan. We demonstrated each task a user would experience with the app and asked questions focusing on how difficult participants find a task, what needs improvement, whether or not they would use this, and if they can tell the food waste aspect of the app. This helped us tremendously on narrowing down unnecessary frames, finding bugs, and making new frames such as onboarding frames to explain the purpose of the app better.
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During the weeks, I created lo-fi wireframes in order to communicate with the developers to determine if a flow is difficult to use or follows our job map well, allowing more efficient work for all teammates. I was able to implement different versions of a feature quickly. These wireframes were also used to get feedback during usability test interviews.
Usability Test Interviews
At each stage of implementing new features to our design and developing stages, we conducted 10 usability tests with BU students with a dining plan. We demonstrated each task a user would experience with the app and asked questions focusing on how difficult participants find a task, what needs improvement, whether or not they would use this, and if they can tell the food waste aspect of the app. This helped us tremendously on narrowing down unnecessary frames, finding bugs, and making new frames such as onboarding frames to explain the purpose of the app better.
Key Features
There are three major pages on the app:
- Home: where users can navigate menus per dining hall
-
Reward: where users can access badges received based on the number of reviews they make
- Profile: where users can edit or update their dietary preference
Style Guide
Brand Identity
The color scheme of the app is primarily green, with accents of color used for the badge system. The logo of the app features two Ts of Terrier Taste combined to create the face of a terrier.Recognition
Demo Day Presentation
At the end of the Spark! Innovation program, all of the 9 teams presented their hard works on demo day. And team Terrier Tastes is delighted to announce that we received the Judge’s Choice Innovation award! Thank you again to our faculty, teaching fellows, and mentors :)
Testing & Revising
Reflections
Solution Testing
After the Demo day presentation, our team presented our app to several departments in Boston University such as BU Sustainability, Innovate@BU [BUildLab], and couple BU students to receive feedback on our app. Most of the feedback was based on presentation of the data.
“It is difficult to find the exact menu I am looking for.
Future Plans
Ultimately, the feedback from students will foster a feedback loop with the dining hall, which the data will be used to enhace ordering decidions, reduce food waste, and create a more sustainable campus. We are currently working on a website to display the data collected for the dining hall to check!
Some next steps for our team would be promoting the app on campus! To contribute to creating a sustainable campus, our team plans to work with BU Dining Services, BU Sustainability, and BuildLab. Stay tuned for where Terrier Tastes is headed! 🤩
After the Demo day presentation, our team presented our app to several departments in Boston University such as BU Sustainability, Innovate@BU [BUildLab], and couple BU students to receive feedback on our app. Most of the feedback was based on presentation of the data.
“It is difficult to find the exact menu I am looking for.
It seems unnecessary that there is ketchup on the menu.”
- Director of BU Sustainability
Based on these feedback, we realized the issue with our organization of the menu display; It displays unnecessary items such as condements and doesn’t group similar dishes together. We decided to categorize the items per station titles (ex. #bakery) based on the tags on the data pulled from API and implement a search bar.
Future Plans
Ultimately, the feedback from students will foster a feedback loop with the dining hall, which the data will be used to enhace ordering decidions, reduce food waste, and create a more sustainable campus. We are currently working on a website to display the data collected for the dining hall to check!
Some next steps for our team would be promoting the app on campus! To contribute to creating a sustainable campus, our team plans to work with BU Dining Services, BU Sustainability, and BuildLab. Stay tuned for where Terrier Tastes is headed! 🤩
