Terrier Tastes

Product Design Branding Sustainability

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!(Download on AppStore & Google Play)

ROLE
Product Designer

TIMELINE
Spring 2023
(BU Spark! Innovation Program)

TEAM
Mina Chung (Product Design)
Abigail Gualda (SWE)
Tyler Nguyen (SWE)
Yin-Ching Lee (SWE)

SKILLS
Product Thinking, Product Design, Prototyping, User Research, Visual Design
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Jira, Illustrator

Highlights

Don’t waste a bite.
Choose right.

Explore the core features of Terrier Tastes

Watch the demo!

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.

Who are we trying to help?

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 starting with 1. Narrowing down the job map 2. Analyzing pain and gain points 3. Listing user priority items 4. Determining user stories 5. Crafting a user persona

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

Workshop results to define our user

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!!!

💡

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!

User Flow & Lo-fi Wireframe

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.

User Interview Transcripts

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 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

As a solo designer on the team, I’ve also had the chance to design the brand identity & design system of the Terrier Tastes app. Building a system allowed cohesiveness in not only the overal app, but also with overall representation.

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.

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 :)

Poster

Demo Day!

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 Sustainability
Based 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!

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