UX
Contract Designer
everytable
Launched last July in South Los Angeles, Everytable is an app that brings a healthy, grab-and-go restaurant/retail hybrid built around chef-developed meals to underserved neighborhoods.
The Everytable concept is unique on several levels, all of which work in concert to achieve the mission of making good, wholesome food available to everyone. The app links up with the closest Everytable restaurant to the user’s location, and allows them to pre-order meals from the menu.
Single moms with two jobs and two-thirds of their monthly income going to pay rent really needed something fast, affordable and convenient to help them feed their families. The solution was a structure for a service that could bring healthy food to these areas, and the key was to be able to do it at a price point comparable to or even better than fast food.
The customer experience mixes aspects of retail and restaurants, but Everytable places a strong focus on hospitality with allowing the user to choose their meal times.
The process
Once having had the the specifications of what this app was aiming to solve, I began my research! I began with a few companies that had similar products to try to understand their decisions for customizing their flows and layouts. I believe that this type of research is not only necessary but heightens a designer’s eye for small details. In my search for patterns, I discovered that emphasizing the uniqueness of our product was essential. In an app store full of meal subscription services, how would Everytable stand out?
I had to think about the outlier users to these other services: maybe those that may not own kitchen gear and unable to cook. Or those that may not have enough time to cook. Saving time seemed to be a common factor here. Creating a flow where it was seamless to sign in and choose meals had to mirror this efficiency.
Some assumptions I had about new users was that they would not want to add their payment information in the beginning without having navigated the app first. According to Google analytics research, I found that the bounce rate of new users on a food service apps were twice as higher when the customer needed to add their payment information at the beginning of the flow, versus after having applied their selections. This later influenced my design so that the payment information was asked at the end of the flow (for iOs users I included the apple pay option).
Below are the first set of wireframes. At this point I was trying to get a sense of the flow and layout, copy and buttons placement, no colors or fonts... yet.
Upon reviewing the flow, I realized there was room to tie up the process by decreasing the number of screens. By allowing the user to login with social media and enabling their current location, it would swiftly guide them directly to their closest Everytable location for pick up or delivery options (all within two screens!). Having more time to choose a time and date, the user can feel the ease of being able to set their eating schedule around their life, not the other way around.
REFLECTIONS
Intentionality is everything. When designing a website, we must focus on who we are we making it for, who they are specifically targeting, and what are the outcomes we want them to achieve. For someone coming from a product background, this may sound obvious. Yet for someone without this type of background, and a powerful mission to share, this principle can easily be overlooked. They might want to share all the things at the same time, in the process drowning even the most powerful message in the noise. The people at Everytable are good at feeding people in Los Angeles—they don’t need to be good at designing apps. It was a perfect opportunity for me to get some freelance experience, and work with a passionate company creating value in the world.
Everytable is powered by ChowNow and can be found in the app store.
