For Design @ UCI’s 2023 Design-a-thon, I collaborated with Kirsten Ochoa in our two-person team — A+K — and designed the mobile app: noms.
Our mobile app, noms, aims to provide a way for individuals to build community through their love of food and foster the curiosity of users by presenting a safe space to learn more about their own, and other cultures. Take a look at how we rapidly ideated and prototyped our product in under 36 hours!
SKILLS
UX Research
UI Design
Wireframing
Prototyping
TOOLS
Procreate
Figma
ROLE
UI/UX Designer
EVENT
Design @ UCI - You Belong Here 2023
TIMELINE
February 2023
(36 Hours)
CONTEXT
Design your own digital application that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity. How can we amplify and empower cultures of community and inclusivity in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and beyond?
PROBLEM
In a post-pandemic world, connecting has gotten more difficult and daunting, leaving so many individuals at a loss of community within their own spaces. We recognized even within our neighborhood there was a lack of interaction between individuals and a lack of connection that allows for empowerment of culture and individuality.
RESEARCH
Through our survey, we found that a majority of respondents are hesitant to reach out to their neighbors and interact with them. Individuals aged 18-25 are less likely to communicate with neighbors than those aged 40 or older. These responses urged us to spend time designing features that would support our intended user audience to find community and build a connection with their neighbors.
SOLUTION
Noms works to undo the fear and lack of socialization that occurred because of the pandemic and encourages users to connect with others through a shared love of food! It allows users to embrace food from their own culture and celebrate the diversity of their community through sharing recipes, forming neighborhood groups, and highlighting different cuisines weekly.
BRAINSTORMING
As mutual lovers of food, the idea to unite people over their interest in cooking/baking came fairly quickly to us and after we decided to pursue this concept we initialized our design process. We develope the brand and style guide for our app and selected welcoming colors and a friendly typeface and created a responsive and representative logo for noms.
LOW-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
After conducting some brief user research, we quickly sketched basic wireframes on Procreate. These low-fidelity wireframes lay out our fundamental features for the application: landing screen and account creation, home page navigation, adding recipes, a search map, recipe-specific pages, neighborhood interaction pages, and the user profile.
HIGH-FIDELITY MOCKUPS
After solidifying our branding and wireframes, we immediately started designing high-fidelity mockups on Figma. Due to the 36-hour timeframe, we had to skip mid-fidelity wireframes and jump to building our hi-fi mockups. We focused on creating mockups for our main pages with basic functionality and a standard user flow.
PROTOTYPING
After finalizing our high-fidelity mockups we moved towards prototyping it and we finished the design-a-thon with a working prototype of noms that showcased the central features and primary user flow of the app.
LESSONS LEARNED
This was my first design-a-thon, and I was surprised by how much work the entire design process required. I realized that creating a high-quality end product requires attention to detail and efficiency with time. Collaborating with my sister eliminated any potential interpersonal problems that may have arisen if I had worked with a group of strangers. Given our existing compatibility, we could focus all of our attention on designing, which resulted in an impressive final prototype.
However, we could have done better in terms of user research. The UX research we conducted was limited as the Google Forms survey we sent out was generic in its questions and did not gather in-depth responses from users. Therefore, we lacked a thorough understanding of the problem we were solving, and as a result, the user experience felt misguided and was not a pivotal aspect of our design process.