Collaborated with developers and designers, I participated to design Yumberry, a meal sharing app for Chinese Palate LLC, RI. My work at the team includes user flow building, wireframe mocking up and graphic designing.
The idea of the Yumberry app combines the desire of some young chefs in Providence, to share their homemade food while practicing their cooking skill, collecting feedbacks and producing income. The founder Boyang Gao is one of these people. Their initial customers are mostly local connections like friends and neighbors, but have built great relationships with people by hosting social events in a home setting. People love the idea of meeting new friends nearby.
After realizing the social value of meal sharing events, Boyang wanted to build a platform for food sharing in Providence to bring together chefs and food enthusiasts. The creation of the app was the next step to make the process of food sharing- including events posting, booking, payment, order management and social account connection- possible.
If the prototype below is not working correctly, please see all pages here.
I started to develop two perspectives based on the customer’s workflow and needs that could be provided by Yumberry. There are two different modes of food sharing based on their desired experiences: dishes for dining at table and packaged foods for delivery. All chefs planning to participate in the business will do either meal sharing or delivery services. Hosting a social event will be booked in the calendar and requires more skill and experience both with cooking and social organization. The current majority of chefs are focused on delivery. Originally my client wanted an online store located in the app dedicated to the food delivery component, separate from the event booking system; however developing those different structures require more time and expense. My perspective is to synthesize a new system where both these fundamentally differing functions (in coding) can be combined and the user experience of accessing these services is simplified.
I went back to the beginning sentiment of this business; to encourage social connections through local food sharing. The food is usually delivered by the chefs to the customer themselves, and I would consider the face-to-face encounter a micro social event. That is what led me to the idea of including the delivery aspect into event booking system. The essential purpose of this business is the value placed on connecting users through their experiences with each other.
My decisions for these designs are to make the complex: simple and digestible to users, unify the back-end logic event lists, items, and order management. The goal for my clients is to save time and expenses on development while preserving their core and original spirit: hosting meal sharing as social networking.
