A website, app, and integrated smart watch created to aid those that have food allergies in the process of dining out at restaurants. We had total freedom to spend time on the concept, sketches and focusing on the user without needing to fully build out a digital prototype. My main concern in switching careers to UX was whether I was going to be sacrificing my desire to help people by switching careers, but this first project taught me how to apply my new skills to helping people in another capacity. I started thinking about how difficult it is for the people in my life who have food allergies to dine out with peace of mind. I created survey questions pertaining to food allergies and dietary restrictions and sent an email out to ten friends. I used the first three people who responded for my user research.
GOALS:
- Make it easier for anyone who has a limited diet (for whatever reason) to look at a menu and see what they can eat at a glance.
- A user should know how amenable to their diet the restaurant is without having to go to the restaurant’s website.
- As digitally displayed menus and internet menu listings become more prevalent, syncing apps to these menus and displaying customized results isn't too far in the future.
- A social review/ranking system like Yelp- users can share their restricted dining experience here and there was room to rank by "allergy friendliness" percentage.
- The dietary information of the user should be available to the restaurant before the user arrives- reservation systems like OpenTable already provide a framework for saving information about reservations- the app should push a user's allergy profile to these systems so the customer doesn't have to have an embarrassing conversation with the waiter at the table and worry that accurate information was being conveyed to the kitchen.
- The watch should monitor vitals for people who had the potential to have anaphylactic reactions when they ate food they were allergic to, so I researched the symptoms and compared that to what vitals smart watches can already measure.
- The watch should be able to call 911 or an emergency contact if needed.
PROTOTYPE AND TESTING
The paper prototype I put together goes through the process of setting up an account and booking a reservation for a user that has a full blown, dangerous food allergy. I wanted to design the app for someone who would need to use the app at its full capacity and figured that user’s who utilized it for a dietary restriction, like being vegetarian or not eating dairy would automatically have those functions available to them by proxy. The paper prototype was then digitized via Marvel.