Transforming the way busy adults enjoy healthy meals, I designed a mobile app for BeachSide SnackShop to streamline food delivery and online ordering. The app empowers users to save time by skipping lines and avoiding meal prep, all while enjoying the convenience of fast and efficient service.
Project Type
UX/UI, UX Research
Team
Alexa Sciacca
Elizabeth Leifheit
Amine Mena
My role
UX Designer and Researcher
Timeline
Sept 2023 - Oct 2023
This project aims to find and address a problem in the Spoken Word On-Demand Audio space, with a specific focus on improving the overall experience for adult podcast listeners. We discovered that adult podcast listeners seek human connection and fresh perspectives. They desire a way to share their favorite podcasts and newfound knowledge beyond their phones, and connect with like-minded individuals who share similar interests.
The proposed solution, the Connection Café, aims to improve community mental health by facilitating in-person interactions through encouraging users to meet face-to-face in the café, hosting live podcast events, and providing equipment to record their own podcasts.
As a team, we decided to hone in on a specific area of the podcast space: adult podcast listeners and their listening experience. Through secondary research and 1-on-1 interviews, we aimed to gather insights, challenges, and pain-points for our potential users to better understand their listening experience and how it affects their mental health.
Through our research we found 4 main pain points:
After a taxing day at work, adult podcast listeners are seeking a hassle-free and relaxed way to engage with fellow listeners beyond their phone screens, in hopes of diverting their minds from work stress.
Now, with an understanding of the challenges adult podcast listeners face, we asked ourselves a key question: How can we provide adult podcast listeners with a means to unwind after a busy day while maintaining a sense of connection with others? This question became the foundation of our design process. From there, we began brainstorming and sketching out initial ideas. These early designs helped us visualize how to craft an intuitive solution that would feel seamless and efficient for our users.
The Connection Café mobile app and physical space aims to improve community mental health by facilitating in-person interactions in today’s technology-focused world.
Build: They can cultivate and build meaningful friendships with people in their community through messaging on the app and meeting in person.
Trust: They can feel confident that they'll be able to have engaging discussions surrounding podcasts with people they know will be interested in the same topics
Disconnect: They'll have a place to unwind after work while remaining stimulated and entertained
Due to the timeline of this project, we were unable to conduct more user testing after our final mockup. It would have been helpful to know what could be improved upon not only in the app, but with the overall business model as well. If we had been given more time with this project, creating low and even mid-fidelity mockups prior to the final high-fidelity mockup would have been helpful in refining our final design. I believe this was also a crucial step that we missed out on in the design process.
Although we live in a social media driven world, people don’t necessarily feel the desire to foster more digital interactions and relationships. People appreciate and yearn for in-person interaction. I believe utilizing that fact, along with the technology we are so lucky to have access to, can help to provide many more solutions for people outside of the podcast space.
