Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
These are the steps of Design Thinking: a set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by UX designers. The steps that are grayed out will not be covered in this case study.
Description
Allowing users to order a custom pizza in under 3 minutes.
Overview
Pizzeria Diavolo allows users to customize their pizza in any which way. They asked us to create an app that would help users create a customized pizza in under 3 minutes.
The purpose of this project was to create low fidelity paper wireframes of an app that would allow users to order a custom pizza in under 3 minutes.
Problem statement
Busy users need a way to order customized pizza in under 3 minutes.
How might we help busy users customize a pizza in a timely manner?
Additional details
While I didn’t develop a persona for this project, I did interview a participant named Felix who fits the description of who we’re designing for: a full-time employee in his mid-30s who often has to work long hours.
I worked on this project by myself, so I handled all facets of the empathizing, defining, and ideating stages. This included writing an interview script, creating low fidelity paper wireframes, and plotting journey and empathy maps.
This project had a short timeline of 2 weeks. This was possible because we were only creating low-fidelity wireframes to submit.
Overview of steps taken
- Initial assumptions
- Competitive analysis
- User interview
- Journey map
- Empathy eap
- User flow
- Ideating
- Paper wireframes
- Test
- Final paper wireframes
Full case study
To start of this project, I wrote down some initial assumptions I had. It’s important to capture these to see which of our assumptions were validated or invalidated based on our research. My initial assumptions were:
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- Something that slowed down users was being overwhelmed by options
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- Too many options meant users didn’t know what to choose
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- Something that slowed down users was being overwhelmed by options
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- Users didn’t like to have to log in/create an account before browsing for options
I also did competitive analysis on other pizza restaurants to see what was working for their apps. I also wanted to identify any pain points that we wanted to avoid in creating our app. Something I realized doing this was that it was popular for pizza restaurants to have a featured deals page with combos.
Based on these assumptions and what I found competitors were doing, I wrote down interview questions to get more information from a participant that matched the user we were designing for: a full-time employee in his mid-30s who often has to work long hours.
I ran a 30-minute interview with a user to get an idea of the pain points and habits they may have when it comes to ordering a pizza online. This interview allowed me to plot a journey map and an empathy map.
Journey map insights gained:
Journey maps help to see the steps Felix would take to learn about and then download our app.
What we realized when creating the journey map was that Felix wanted to be able to build off existing pizzas. Add bacon to Margherita. Add mushrooms to Meat Lovers. We also realized he wanted to know what other people recommended. He wanted suggestions based on what other users were ordering.
Empathy map insights gained:
Empathy maps allow us to gain deeper insights about our users.
While plotting the empathy map, we noticed that some of his pain points were:
- Not being able to see his total before going to checkout
- Not being able to save customized products
- Sometimes there were too many options and he was left feeling overwhelmed
Reviewing our initial assumptions, one was validated and one was not. The assumption that was validated is that “Something that slowed down users was being overwhelmed by options”. This was validated due to our empathy map.
Next I worked on ideating. I created a user flow to see how users would interact with our app.
Now that I knew the screens that were needed, I started with doing some crazy 8s just to get some ideas down on paper. Crazy 8s is a quick brainstorm tool where you come up with 8 concepts in 8 minutes. It helps us think outside the box, and just get down whatever idea comes up. After reviewing these, the best options that allowed users to achieve the goal of ordering in under 3 minutes were refined, still keeping them on paper since it’s the very beginning stages of the project.
We received in-class feedback on our paper wireframes. At this stage, I turned them into medium-fidelity wireframes to be able to better present the idea. This wasn’t technically a project requirement, but it did not take long to create the medium fidelity and I wanted to be able to showcase a digital version.
The big idea
The feedback we received from our interview was that they wanted to be able to see what others were eating as that would help them choose what to get themselves. For that reason, we split the ingredients options into tabs. The left tab option showcased the standard ingredients (cheese, meat, vegetables) and right-hand tab showed that ingredients were by chosen by other users.
Cool thing
A portion of the app that we developed is the Pizza Roulette. This feature allows users to “spin the pizza” to receive a randomly customized pizza. They are listed the ingredients and are then able to edit the pizza or add it to their cart as is. This feature is fun, unique, and who knows what kind of pizza you’ll end up with!