Overview

The food truck phenomenon has recently become a booming industry and is an important part of Boston’s culture. BostonFeed.Me was a website aimed to assist users in locating food trucks and exploring new food options in the city.

Discussions with food truck owners and online research showed the majority of food truck owners and operators lack the web-savvy skills to create a website to market their brands and reach a large audience. Instead, we found owners typically used Twitter as their primary means of 'daily location' communication to their customers. While Twitter works as a news feed style of communication, it doesn't allow the companies to showcase their menu, brand, or additional general information in a short number of characters. By creating a central website featuring the locations, schedules, menus, photos, ratings, and social media accounts of all Boston-registered food trucks, we’re allowing easier access to these trucks and promoting the exploration of Boston food culture. Feed Me’s main feature is a food-truck-finding map filterable by day, time, food type, and location. As users are increasingly searching for information on-the-go, the site leverages essential geo-location capabilities to help users find the food they want to eat closest to their current location. 

What We Did

Wireframe to Design

Sketches

Inspiration

Moodboards

As a part of our design process, we conducted user research, identified key personas, defined a target audience, created visual mood boards, sketched paper prototypes, outlined wireframes, and designed initial comps before conducting multiple rounds of usability tests on our working prototype. Based on feedback from multiple users, we made selective iterations until the site produced a friction-free experience. In the future, Feed Mee can be used as a framework to solve health-related issues such as ensuring healthy food options for low-income populations in food desert communities.

Initial Wireframe Sketches

Logo Exploration

Visual Design Drafts

Alternative Use Cases for the Framework

Using existing patterns and learning to not reinvent the wheel for similar problem sets is a valuable lesson in creating an 'easy-to-use' product or service. The key components of 'easy-to-use' are familiarity and affordance. Surprisingly often, I've seen brand new products fail because they innovate to solve common user goals — such as tabbed navigation, dropdowns or form input. Using an existing design system or copying a popular framework is a strategic way to reduce cognitive strain and (and reduce development costs!).

Since this was a small-scale project, we update the branding and UI to offer alternative solutions for our existing prototype that accomplished similar goals. In this case, we built mobile food truck and social rideshare add-on applications.

Mobile Marts:

Goal: Increase access to affordable healthy fruits and vegetables in the form of 'mobile marts' in common food desert areas of major cities and rural areas alike.
Use Case: Users open the site to find where their local 'mobile marts' are in their neighborhood. Since the owners of these marts aren't necessarily digitally-focused, this site would manage the operating hours, food menus, and weekly location updates.

Chat N Ride:

Goal: Increase access to social opportunities via distinct rideshare filtering parameters such as music interests, rating average, and the type of ride you're looking to have.
Use Case: Users open the site (integrated with Uber) and have the ability to choose their driver on a map or select based on the goals of their trip.