Terrier Tastes
Product DesignWe are thrilled to announce that following our exciting Demo Day win for Judge’s Choice Innovation Award, our app has now launched!(Download on AppStore
Product Designer
Spring 2023
(BU Spark! Innovation Program)
Mina Chung (Product Design)
Abigail Gualda (SWE)
Tyler Nguyen (SWE)
Yin-Ching Lee (SWE)
Product Thinking, Product Design, Prototyping, User Research, Visual Design
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Jira, Illustrator
Don’t waste a bite.
Choose right.
Tackling the Challenge
⚠️
Redefined Problem Space
BU students often discard food at the dining hall due to unsatisfactory taste, leading to increased waste, as there’s no indicator to predict dish satisfaction.
Defining Users
After these exercises, we defined that our target 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
💡
Our Solution
Inspired by products like Yelp, Reddit, and Rate My Professor, which are often used by students to get other’s insights to help their decision making, we came up with Terrier Tastes, a dining hall menu rating app!
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 above.
These lo-fi wireframes allowed a streamlined alignment with the team, especially on the development side. By sharing a visual and flow of how we envision the product to perform, the developers were able to call out 1. if a flow is feasible, and 2. follows our job map well. These iterative approach enabled me to implement different versions of a feature quickly based on engineering feedback.
We demonstrated each task a user would experience with the app and asked questions focusing on 1. how difficult participants find a task, 2. what needs improvement, 3. whether or not they would use this, and 4. 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.
MVP Feature
After much refinement, the team narrowed our MVP to 3 major features/ pages for 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
Crafting Visual Identity for Terrier Tastes
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, also resembling a fork.
Demo Day Presentation
Testing & Revising
Reflections
Reactions
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 SustainabilityBased on these feedback, we realized the issue with our organization of the menu display; It displays unnecessary items such as condiments 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
Some future ideas beyond the MVP might be an internal dashboard for BU to view data collected for the dining hall. Ultimately, we envision that the feedback from students will foster a feedback loop with the dining hall, which the data will be used to enhance ordering decisions, reduce food waste, and create a more sustainable campus. And truly hope our product opens the conversation in creating a more sustainable campus!
Learnings
Working on a 0 to 1 product in a 3 month sprint as a solo designer was not so easy, but was such a rewarding and motivating experience. I can confidently say that Terrier Tastes is the project that confirmed my passion for product design. I am truly thankful to have had such supportive and talented group of engineers who taught me product development is a constant negotiation, iteration, and alignment around the problem (& technical constraints haha). Will always remind myself to 1. have an open-mindedness to understand the user’s needs 2. stay adaptived to change, and 3. stay optimistic!