Meet & Eat Case Study
Hackathon Website Design
Overview
Together with three other UX designers, I participated in the Dubstech Protothon for a weekend-long UX online hackathon. Our team created and designed Meet & Eat, a meal kit service providing long-distance partners with an interactive virtual cooking experience, utilizing Agora's features. Our team split all of the roles equally with each of us collaboratively taking parts of each design aspect. See our final submission on Google Slides.
Introduction
The Dubstech Protothon was designed as a no code, UX design hackathan with the aim of testing 'rapid prototyping and design thinking skills.' With three tracks to choose from, we began by brainstorming together on Miro to quickly come up with as many ideas as we could.
Valentine's Day Track: Your task is to envision an experience that provides a fun engaging virtual valentine’s day experience for long distance couples bringing them closer together by heart.
Enterprise Track: Your task is to think outside of the box and design an enterprise Real Time Engagement mobile or web application that showcases how Agora’s video conferencing/voice/streaming/messaging solutions can be used.
Ultimately our team decided to use the Valentine's Day track as inspiration for an Enterprise track submission. The covid-19 pandemic has disrupted one of the most common date activities; eating together. Together we came up with “Meet & Eat,” a meal kit delivery service, providing users a new way to connect meaningfully by sharing a meal.
The Problem
Romantic partners who can’t see each other face-to-face have a hard time generating meaningful ways to communicate, stay connected, and share quality time in real time.
How might we?
How might we make a remote dating experience where partners can easily communicate and share quality time?
Solution
Creating a desktop app for romantic foodies addresses their need for meaningful face-to-face interaction and customizable date ideas, will utilize Agora’s features, and is a flexible and interactive way to go on dates remotely.
Research
In order to understand more about how we could implement our solution, we conducted extensive competitor research. We also sent out a survey and conducted user interviews.
Competitor Research
We split up the research tasks and began by identifying meal kit services, recipe apps, cooking platforms and more. We focused on how these work as well as their features and focus. As we were incorporating Agora's solutions, we also spent time a lot of time researching Agora and their features.
User Interviews
Our aim with the user interviews were to understand user experience with online dating, online experiences, and creating food together (in person and online, if applicable). We identified three people to interview who both had experience with online dating and considered themselves foodies. In order to get a range of experiences, we interviewed a generation z, a millenial, and a baby boomer.
User Interview Findings
Through the interviews, we identified 3 major pain points.
Pain Point #1
“It’s hard to stay engaged in online experiences because it doesn’t feel interactive enough.”
Pain Point #2
“Not knowing what to talk about can lead to awkward silences on remote video calls.”
Pain Point #3
“I have a hard time deciding what to cook.“
Design
Our team split up roles for the design stage between UI design, wireframing, and prototyping. I largely worked on UI design and contributed to all other areas.
UI Design
This color palette was created to represent Meet & Eat. Green was used to give off a sense of freshness, especially as it relates to food and this shade of purple to represent excitement and fun.
High Fidelity Screens
Our team collaboratively created the final screens to solve the problem and each pain point. We also implemented Agora's features. Agora Video call: couples will feel connected by being able to share every moment of the experience through a video call. Agora real time messaging: Using the messaging feature, couples can easily plan the date within the Meet & Eat platform, hassle-free! Agora recording: Users can record the cooking session so they can remember the experience forever.
Solution #1
To tackle the pain point #1 “It’s hard to stay engaged in online experiences because it doesn’t feel interactive enough," our team came up with the following:
The video chat allows users to feel connected throughout the cooking session.
Users can go through each step in unison:
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Video instructions play & stop on each screen simultaneously
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Both users indicate they are done with the task to proceed to the next step together
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Users can reflect on the experience together & rate the dish once they've finished eating
Solution #2
To tackle the pain point #2 “Not knowing what to talk about can lead to awkward silences on remote video calls,” our team came up with the following:
Prompts with ice-breaker questions appear on the screen throughout the cooking sessions to encourage conversation. This feature can be turned off.
Solution #3
To tackle the pain point #3 “I have a hard time deciding what to cook,“ our team came up with the following:
The desktop app supports the user through decision making, offering suggestions based on user interests.
Users are provided with solutions that work with all parties involved in the shared meal experience:
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Onboarding food preferences
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Quizzes to pick meals
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Randomized options
Final Thoughts
This was such a fun project to work on that required quick thinking, collaboration, and determination. I learned how quickly solutions can be made when working together on high-pressure projects. To see our final submission on Google slides, click here.