Grub Club
Grub Club is an app that was conceptualized to help organize office lunches. The app offers users the opportunity to choose a preferred time and restaurant of choice by offering restaurant information and menus for users to help decide where they’d like to order from and what they’d like to order. This information is then used by the office manager, or whoever is in charge of organizing lunches, to choose a restaurant and place orders either by phone or through a third-party website or application.
The Problem:
What features make choosing restaurants a breeze? How can we get the necessary information from an entire office of people? How can we make it a democratic decision to ensure fairness? What features are absolutely necessary and which ones are irrelevant for the user?
The Research:
Since this app is unique in its offering, I had to look to ordering apps like Ritual, JustEat, and UberEats to get a feel for the kinds of features that make choosing and ordering a meal a seamless experience. Through my research I made note of how information was displayed and how to make the app more useful for an office that may be using it multiple times a week.
I interviewed two people who use these apps at least once a week and got some insight into what features they found useful and which features were unused by them. Both subjects agreed that having a favourite option was useful and having access to a map view, price point, and reviews/ratings was also a key factor in helping make a decision. I also got an understanding of what kind of designs provide for a more pleasant experience for the user by showing a number of examples of apps already in market.
The Solution:
After performing my research and looking to similar existing apps for inspiration, I set out to get started on designing Grub Club. Since my interviews revealed that the sleeker and less busy design of apps like Ritual and UberEats were the ones that they gravitated towards I decided to let that dictate some of the design choices I made.
I went with a modern, neutral colour palette of golden-brown, beige, charcoal and an off-white. For the font, I settled on the modern and clean Verlag font family. I chose Verlag because it fit in with the modern aesthetic I was looking to achieve with the app; it’s clean, crisp, and easy to read.
For imagery I had originally kept it quite minimal with just a solid, neutral background colour, but this felt a little too naked and cold so I went with a simple image of food for the login screen to help set the mood and invite hungry users in. For the rest of the app I settled on an image of herbs on a cutting board to instill a fresh and healthy aesthetic, while not distracting from the task at hand for the users.
When it came to features, I stuck pretty close to the wireframes that were provided, but after performing my user interviews I decided to add a favourite option so users can keep track of which restaurants are their favourites, making the decision-making less overwhelming.
Summary:
With so many ordering apps to turn to for inspiration, I really thought that this would be a breeze to design, but there was so much to consider that hadn’t even crossed my mind when first looking over the project brief. Many existing ordering apps offer too many unnecessary features which leads to a cluttered and less intuitive design, choosing a restaurant to order from with a group of people is stressful enough, the features and design of an app shouldn’t add to this stress!
