Project

Creating an App to Enhance the Social Dining Experience

Role

UX/UI Design

Firm

Pratt Institute

Tool

Figma

Team

Carolyn Yu, Krystal Ebron, Maria Menendez Intriago, Ruhee Shah, and Vicky Chen

What is Meet A Meal?

Meet A Meal is a social dining app that helps people build connections and friendships over meals. The app offers users the option to connect with potential friends based on shared interests and facilitates social connections through the dining experience. It enables users to find food buddies to dine with in restaurants, ultimately helping them to build friendships and a community through socializing over a meal.

Opportunity

As the world has become increasingly digitalized, society has evolved, and a growing number of people are now making new friends and connections through online platforms.

​

Through our research, we discovered that introverts have the desire to interact with others, yet find it challenging to build long-lasting friendships and socialize with new people in real life, regardless of the amount of online connections they have.

User Research​

We conducted a survey of 35 respondents and interviewed 6 people to find areas to motivate people to socialize and improve the social dining experience.

Insights

  • Understanding Introverts: Their Social Preferences and Tendencies


    People who describe themselves as introverts tend to be conscious of being judged by others when they socially interact.

    They prefer smaller groups to have meaningful conversations for social gatherings.

    They dislike small talk and prefer to be around people who understand their tendencies.

  • The Benefits of Social Dining for Solo Diners


    People feel awkward eating alone in formal restaurants and are willing to dine with new people but prefer to have similar interests and age.

  • The Power of Transparency


    People like to know all the facts about the socializing event before committing to attend.

  • Dining Decisions


    When choosing a restaurant, people tend to consider reviews, ratings, and places recommended by friends or in postings from online media or social media.

Target Audience

Introverts
Seeking Social Connections

While Meet A Meal is for everyone who is looking for an opportunity to have an enjoyable time and build a community through social dining, our main focus for this product was on introverts, with the intent to empower them to build meaningful connections and motivate them to socialize with new people without suffering from burnout.

Persona

Empathy Mapping

Based on the insights and interviews, we created an Empathy map to understand aspects of the users’ feelings in order to address the users’ needs in decision making.

Key Features

  • Customizable interests ​

  • Search filters

  • Chat with participants with common interests

  • Participants’ information

Site Map

To evaluate the findability of topics in this app and observe how users navigate between categories, we conducted tree testing using Optimal Workshop with 10 participants.

Wireframing

Design System

Customizable interests

Allows users to choose their interests and preferences. Users receive event recommendations based on their selections.

Search filters

Options to sort the group size, meeting date, and preferences to narrow down the results page to facilitate decision making.

Detail pages

Provides users all the event information before they commit to joining, including who is going and the participant’s hobbies, interests, or personality type.

Chat with participants with common interests

When users join an event for a social gathering, the participants can message each other leading up to the meet and after. While in the chat, the bot reminds the participants what common interests they have to get a sense of who they are.

Profile

Allows users to revisit their interests or preferences to edit if it needed. User can check their upcoming meets.

UserTesting

Six remote moderated user testings were conducted using low-fidelity prototype we built in order to evaluate our products and confirm they meets users' expectations.

Five tasks were given to analyze our users’ behavior when interacting with the product’s key features.

Prototype

After several iterations in which we redesigned user interfaces to address issues that we uncovered from user testing, we emphasized and streamlined our key features, removed the icebreaker game feature we initially thought to include in this app, and optimized our product with a high-fidelity prototype.