creator restaurant ordering app
for Momentum machines & frog Ventures
End-to-end design for a concept restaurant’s mobile app.
Project: As part of a frog ventures program, frog and Momentum Machines (startup from SF) worked together to create a mobile ordering app for an innovative, robot-made burger joint experience called Creator. Momentum wanted to give the users a unique app to create a precisely perfect and experimental burger. Our challenge was to make it lovable and easy to use repeatedly. The restaurant soft-launched in SF (see introductory website at http://creator.rest) and the app is currently in development.
Process: As a lean frog and client team we worked very fast and close. We often colocated and held multiple working sessions a week to make quick decisions with the CEO and stakeholders. We favored hand sketches to show intent, jumpstart start visual design and motion studies and prototypes, and get quick buy-in from our client partners.
My roles and responsibilities: As the senior interaction designer, I worked in close collaboration with a visual design lead, a strategist and a program manager to define the product strategy. When we added other visual and interaction designers to the program I helped guide them in day-to-day production. One of my achievements on the projects was guiding the client and our internal team through the process (both were mostly unfamiliar with product design and process). I took the initial client brief, broke it down to functionality areas and prioritized an initial MVP to guide our design sprint planning. I helped write user stories, manage sprints and later when I rolled of the program, left the team with enough requirements to finish the program.
PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
1. Using motion for quick TESTING
We used motion studies to make interaction design decisions easier to fully understand. Some ideas, such as partial scrolling to view item details, failed after we did a quick motion study.
Our first interaction model concept was a spatially-inspired design that contained restaurant menu in a dedicated layer and users’ personal creations on a separate lower one. A quick prototype and guerrilla user testing with friends & family quickly showed us the need for a more familiar interaction model.
2. Establishing clear requirements
Our clients were incredibly ambitious yet working on a tight timeline. To manage expectations and minimize scope creep, I led the prioritization of features and functionality and developed an initial MVP to guide or sprint planning.
Later when I rolled of the program, the team had sufficient requirements and guidelines to finish of the production work.
3. Sketch, white board and repeat
To support a highly collaborative and iterative process with the clients, expressing and articulating design intent at every stage was very important in my work. I facilitated whiteboarding sessions with the team multiple times a week to build together, and then captured the thinking in wires, artifacts, and flows.