Food Tracker
Social Design
Academic Project
Instructor: Karen Berntsen, Skip Shelly
Time Span: 3 Weeks
Contribution: UX Design, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team Members: Meng Wan, Andrew Wang, Shuo Wang
Overview
Food Tracker is a mobile app which connects food truck owners and customers. Food truck owners could make their schedule based on different locations in Pittsburgh and also provide a platform for customers to pre-order food online ahead of time. In this way, customers who rely on food truck as their main lunch source could be aware of the schedule of food trucks on a specific corporate area and organize their lunch plan ahead of time.
The Context
Design Process
KEY SCREENS
Weekly Plan
One major feature presented within the app is the ability to see a weekly schedule of which food trucks are present on each day. This functions as a way for users to prepare for the week in advance. It essentially guarantees reliable schedule to follow for the week and lets the user prepare for days that they may want to make food themselves or get food elsewhere.
By clicking on the day, the user will be able to see detailed information about which food trucks are available on the day with the food truck menu and a description about what types of food the food truck serves as well as hours of operation.
Preordering
Preordering was implemented to provide users who want to preplan their week. By ordering in advance, the user will know which days they’ve already ordered for, and which days they still need to prepare for themselves .
Truck owners will then be able to view the pre-order information and gain a better understanding of what their most popular dishes are and how many people to expect.
Navigation & Notification
The live map was also an incredibly important feature of our application. One of the biggest concerns our participants expressed was the inability to know when and where the food trucks were. This made the process of checking a lot more stressful and was a constant daily burden. We plan to track each available food truck spot and have an automatic location check-in process for each food truck that can provide the time they arrive at the spot as well as which specific location they’ve arrived at. If the user has pre-ordered any food they can see what their order was and receive a push notification thirty minutes before their food and food truck are expected to arrive. This way the user is prepared throughout the day and doesn’t need to think about when and where their lunch is. It increases the reliability of the system from the user’s perspective and when more food trucks and locations are implemented into the system, it could easily be modified to see the map by food desert location as well.