Pickle
CASE STUDY
OVERVIEW
A personalized food-finding experience for indecisive people who want to discover new restaurants and make plans with friends — so you never have to be in a pickle over where to go!
Problem
Deciding on somewhere to eat is usually the biggest and perhaps the most dreaded question we all face when making plans with our friends. In an ideal world, everyone would agree on a place within minutes, and before you know it we'd all be sipping on mimosas at brunch together.
However, planning to grab food — whether it's brunch, lunch, dinner, or drinks — is often difficult because:
People are indecisive
Nobody wants to be too imposing
Decision fatigue is real
Market Research
I began by analyzing food-finding apps that are currently on the market, listing out the pros and cons of their user experience and interface. What I found was that most existing apps focus on the objective food-finding aspect, but lack a sense of personalization. There were also many issues with visual hierarchy, which made it hard to process information and weigh out restaurant options.
Market Research Findings
User Research
My target audience was younger, social users who seek new experiences, so to validate this issue and figure out this group's main pain points, I interviewed 12 individuals in their 20s from different cities. The biggest takeaways from these interviews were that:
Most people find food through friend recommendations and social media.
The biggest planning issues are indecision, having no preferences, or not wanting to be too imposing on others.
The biggest deciding factors are the menu and atmosphere.
Product Requirements
With these 2 questions in mind, I thought of some features that could help solve users' food recommendation and event planning issues. These features included:
Personalized recommendations
Social media integration
Ability to create group events
Anonymous polling
Sketches
User Flows
From here, I mapped out the paths users could take to accomplish these goals based on the narrative below:
"A group of friends plan to get lunch together this weekend, but nobody has anything particular in mind and nobody can make a decision on where to go."
Low-Fidelity Explorations
Through low-fidelity wireframes, I explored how users could most efficiently and effectively reach their end goal. To decide which iterations to move forward with, I evaluated how well each screen was able to communicate information without being too overwhelming and analyzed the tradeoffs of each design.
Low-Fidelity Explorations
Here are the key characteristics that distinguished the screens I chose to move forward with from the rest:
Visual components were used to draw attention to the information users pay the most attention to.
The interface displayed just enough info to prevent decision fatigue while still providing sufficient knowledge to the user.
A clear hierarchy was established.
In a Pickle?
Pickle's got your back.
RESTAURANT RECOMMENDATIONS
Personalized Recs
Swiping through restaurant recommendations helps Pickle learn more about the user and what they look for in a restaurant. Based on swiping patterns, a user will be given recommendations tailored towards their preferences. The main criteria for preferences would be cuisine, atmosphere, and ratings.
Social Media Integration
There is a dedicated feed for friends' Instagram posts and stories that include restaurant tags, as users tend to put more value and trust into restaurants their friends can personally vouch for.
HANGOUT PLANNING
Anonymous Polling
Users can schedule food-related events with their friends through an in-app scheduling system with an anonymous polling system to take the pressure off the decision-making process.
Reflection
KeEP IT SIMPLE
Reconstructing and overcomplicating processes that already work well is unnecessary. I realized that staying true to the current steps people take to achieve certain actions and bringing in features to refine that process made for the best results. It maintains a familiar system, making it easy to navigate, and simply adds or transforms parts of the process that make their lives easier.
VALIDATION
This project was based on me and my friends' personal experiences with restaurant discovery on the East Coast. If I were to continue improving Pickle, I'd talk to a wider audience (especially in terms of location) to learn about how different external factors affect the food-finding process and how that could affect my approach to the product.
Revisiting
IN 2023
The use of social media has transformed drastically since I first worked on this project. According to this TechCrunch article, younger users are increasingly turning to TikTok and Instagram over Google and other traditional search engines for restaurant discovery.
"These users don’t tend to type in keywords but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways."
Since short-form video content has taken over as a marketing strategy, I'd be interested in exploring how the evolution in content engagement could be applied to the restaurant world to provide people with a more interactive discovery experience.