Talace

User Research / Product Design

Talace is a platform that showing customers the top dishes at every restaurant—without leafing through a million ratings to find out. Combined with pictures of food and pricing, Talace makes your dining experience simple.

Before

After

Background

When I first join the team, Talace has already released several months. The original product was a mobile ordering and rewards platform for restaurants. By observing consumers’ interaction with the app and getting feedback on their frustrations, the team realized information like a restaurant’s dishes pictures, best items, and pricings, were not as accessible as it should be for customers.

My Role

As the only designer at the time, I was responsible for helping conceptualize, research, map out the user flow, create wireframes, design the user interface, and ensure the brand language has carried out consistently throughout the design.

Challenges and Limitation

1. Unclear on the audience’s needs
2. Undefined product scope
3. Already established brand language

Process

Understanding Our Audience

My team interviewed/surveyed 100 people in Gainesville, FL area. The participants are ranging from college students to full-time professionals. My colleagues asked them about their dining experience to understand their various needs. They also gave each participant a brief description of the app’s general concept to see if they are interested in downloading it and the likeliness they are going to take advantage of the features the app has to offer.

Research Findings

Based on our research, we generated three key findings:

Ideate Solutions

According to our research findings, the main problem we should focus on is:

Help customers decide what to eat, and where to eat.

To simplify the process the app helps customers pick the food by popularity, ingredients, community recommendation (friends, chef, and server), and price range. It only shows the top 10 menu items at nearby restaurants and customers can see actual pictures and prices of those items as well.

With the logic flow in mind, I started to sketch out the user interface of the major screens:

Prototype

We quickly gathered peer feedbacks after our first round prototype. The most frequent problems people raised were:

• The top area already occupied by the account button and the map/list view button. Where will the filter button be located for the latter version
• Customers prefer to see what’s the popular item first, then going to the detail. The current design only shows one item once someone clicks on the restaurant page; it will increase the workload for users which our app should avoid.
• Search by location function seems overlapped with the map view function. The search feature should also allow customers to search by restaurant name, cuisine type, or food type.

Iteration

Interactive Prototype

Landing Page