I love exploring and finding new places to eat, especially if I’m in a new area, but I’ve always had a hard time finding places to even try. The process can be daunting and time-consuming, involving sifting through numerous reviews to decide which restaurant to take a chance on. Additionally, it can be challenging to discern whether a negative review is a reflection of poor quality food or simply a bad experience. This is why my friends and I came together to create Ko. Ko is our passion project to help people explore new restaurants without having to go through the arduous process of researching.
My Role
Co-founder, UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher, Visual Designer, Marketing Lead, Project Management
Team
Backend Engineer, Front End Developer, Product Manager
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Google Drive
The Problem
Everyone has different preferences when it comes to their ideal dining experience. Some people enjoy a cozy environment and pristine service, while others don’t care if the place is a little more dirty; they just want good authentic food. That’s where apps like Yelp and Google Maps fail to address when it comes to restaurant exploration. Reviews and star ratings don’t encompass what exactly people liked and disliked about the restaurant. On top of that, people will simply have different tastes in what they think is good food.
With Ko, as a user rates and reviews restaurants, Ko will learn more about the user’s preferences as well as the restaurant itself. Rather than just defining a restaurant as bad because it has 1 star, it might be more enjoyable for other who do not necessarily care about cleanliness or nice waiters.
User Research
Our research’s core question was to figure out if other people had the same problem as us. We wanted to understand how long did it take other people to discover restaurants, what did their process look like, and what parts of it were frustrating about it. We sent out a survey to our target demographic (young urban professionals) and received over 50 responses. Most of the responses reflected the problems we had with the food discovery process.
From the survey, we also were able to get in touch with individuals who were also interested in doing video interviews for further research. In these video interviews, we had the interviewees walk through their full restaurant discovery process and talked in depth what qualities of a restaurant are important to them. We also learned in more depth what aspects of the process was frustrating for them and what they wanted to see in a future app that could solve their current issues.
Brainstorming
We spent many iterations to figure out how exactly we wanted to solve this problem. We had a list of recommendations, to three recommendations a week, to adding rerolls. We ultimately decided to suggest one recommendation per day to help users pick what they want to try. We understood that one of the core problems people encounter while deciding where to eat is too many places to pick from. Limiting their recommendations to just one a day helps the user eliminate the other options they have and commit to trying something new.
One recommendation a day also creates a fun mystery box effect that encourages the users to come back to the app every day to see what they get. The scarcity of recommendations also pushes users to share the app with their friends and share their results with each other.
Wireframing & Low Fidelity
With just 2 designers on the team, we had to split much of the work. We used Figma to collaborate with each other easily and did many iterations on different wireframes.
As for the style guide, we wanted to convey a more sleek and modern feel to the restaurant exploration process. After many different iterations, we landed on a soft gold and green combination. The name Ko comes from the Chinese word 口 (kou), which means mouth.
Style Guide & High Fidelity
Unlike my past projects, this was the first time in my personal projects where we were handing off designs to development, so it was even more important to build high fidelity designs that had completed user flows and edge cases. Because we are still a small team, we did not need to make a fully functioning prototype, but it was important to track all the different states a screen could have, including error states and loading pages.
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Results & Takeaways
The app is currently in Beta and being tested by a handful of users in the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virgina) area. This was a really fun process that fully walked through the whole UX and UI Design process. It was my first time running through the whole process that included delivery.
Up to this point, I’ve learned so much more about the design process. The development handoff is definitely something that could be improved on. There were many screens that we didn’t realize we needed to create for developers to see so they could develop it. From this experience, I have a better understanding of what exactly is needed for a smoother handoff process. At the same time, it was really helpful to be constantly communicating with our
Looking Forward
We will still continue iterating and improving this app as long as people are interested! Check out our website for the latest updates: kofoodapp.com. We are currently applying for grant funding and prize money to help build this app more quickly as well as get more eyes on our app more quickly. Check out our pitch deck here.