Context: Food Mood was my project for the UX Mobile Design class at the 2016 SVA Summer Intensive in Interaction Design. The brief was to create an app map, wireframes, and visual design for a food-based app, focusing on the user experience.
Goals: My aim was to create an engaging, beautiful interface that would make choosing what to eat fun and easy for people who are hungry and likely impatient, maybe even tending towards hangry. I also had in my mind people struggling with appetite problems due to illness or medication. Instead of scrolling through endless food choices, they can choose a flavor, a texture, and a size (though any or even all can be skipped) and Food Mood will provide a suggestion. If it's not right, you can start over. If it sounds good, you can either get a nearby restaurant suggestion or a recipe.
Impact of User Centered Design Process: The app is still a work in progress, but the input from my friends, classmates, and professor was invaluable in making Food Mood more usable and fun, even as a prototype. Marvel is a great tool for making quick iterations that can easily be tested by others.
Additional information: Here is the interactive prototype in Marvel:
Some additional screens:
Below is an earlier black and white wireframe version:
Initial wireframes for an Apple TV version are below.
The earliest version of the app was a simple app map and bare bones wireframe to lay out the kernel of the idea (using OmniGraffle). Feedback showed the idea to have promise but need further expansion and refinement, for example the animation (though I was quite attached to it) needed to go, as feedback showed users felt it needlessly delayed them from their result, and delaying hungry users is not a good move. So out it went. Other modifications based on feedback including making the choices on the results page very clear and direct, and giving feedback about how many steps in total the chooser would be asking.
