Restaurant Menu App — UX Case Study
Overview
Eating out is one of the most common day-out activity among general population. The basic steps you follow when you go out to eat are: Scanning through the menu, deciding what dishes to eat and giving the order to the waiter. Currently the menus are in physical form and you have to remember what your order is. Also, the menus are not interactive because they are just hardbound paper menus. Here a problem can be clearly seen that the customer has to remember their order and go through many pages of the menu to find their preferred category or item.
The motive of this app is to provide a digitized menu which can be easily navigated by the customer and the selected items can be added to a wishlist (named as Orderlist here).
This app was made as a part of an internship assessment.
The brief was as follows:
Design an app for a restaurant that would be able to show to the customer the menu of the restaurant.
The menu should focus on the following points:
— Should replicate the offline menu viewing experience for the customers
— Focus should be on the ability to easily view the menu rather than placing the order from the menu
— However, customers should be able to mark the menu items so that they can easily tell the items to be ordered to the waiter when the waiter arrives in minimum time
My Role
Design Strategy, Research, Persona, User Flow, Wireframes, Visual Design
Design Process
Problem
1. No proper app available for restaurant menus only
2. Only the scanned image or soft copy of the menu is available but it is not interactive
3. Users cannot save the selected items in a list and hence might get confused or forget their order when the waiter comes
What this App does
This app aims to solve the problems listed above.
The main idea was to make the menu look clean, simple and easy to navigate.
As soon as the app opens, the customer gets an option to select between the food or the bar menu. According to the selection, the customer is directed to the next screen.
The menu screen has categories from which the customer can select what food category he/she wants to look through.
List of items is shown according to the categories selected. Tapping on the item directs the customer to the page which consists of the item’s description.
An option to add the item to the Orderlist is given to the customer. The customer can view the order list and delete any items if he wishes so.
Target Users
Customers of all age groups at restaurants/cafes/bars, etc.
User Persona
User Goals
The user should be able to:
1. Browse through different menus available at the restaurant
2. Browse through different categories present in the menu
3. See details of a particular menu item
4. Add item to Orderlist
User Flow
User flows are the deliverables visualizing the complete path that users follow across the whole solution.
UX Principles applied
1. Meet the User’s needs
2. Make navigation easy and simple
3. Have a clear hierarchy
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Visual Design
Visual Style
Logo of Restaurant
The logo of the restaurant was given a sleek, modern an minimal feel to match the vibe of the restaurant.
Color and typography
Conclusion
This app tries to cover and solve all the problems discussed above and provides a viable solution.
Working on this project gave me an insight into the entire process beginning from devising a strategy to the final product.
The scope of this project is very large and it has the capacity for additional features which should be added to make this an even better solution.
