Planning a catering menu for a wedding can be time-consuming, overwhelming, and require a lot of in-person meetings with the caterer. Busy professionals do not have the time to meet with caterers, but still want a personalized catering menu.
I've designed an app that will let busy professionals customize a catering menu for their weddings all within the app—which streamlines the entire catering planning process saving them time and stress.
The biggest challenge for this project was converting a complicated and time-consuming process of assembling a five-course wedding menu into a process that involves only a few clicks within the app.
wedding catering app
Project Overview
role:
Lead UX designer, User research, Wireframing, Prototyping, Testing
timeline:
Mar 2022 to Apr 2022
A convenient and easy way to plan your wedding catering menu.
Catering pricing is not transparent and the cost breakdowns can be confusing.
Pain Point #4: Lack of Price Transparency
Communicating questions, concerns, or updates to caterer can be inconvenient and/or challenging.
Pain point #3: inconvenient
Food/drinks don’t specify whether each dish meets certain dietary restrictions.
Pain Point #2: Meeting Dietary Restrictions
Brides are too busy, stressed, and/or too far away to meet in-person with catering to plan the catering menu.
Pain Point #1: Time-consuming
User Research
I conducted four interviews with people who have planned catering for their wedding in addition to secondary research. The primary user group is adult brides who are too busy to plan the logistics of catering. The research identified the following pain points with the existing catering planning process:
The interviews revealed that while budgets are important, users wanted to quickly and conveniently put together a catering menu from a list of food options that would meet their guests' dietary restrictions and had price transparency. Users wanted to limit their in-person meeting with the caterer and conveniently communicate changes to the menu throughout the planning process.
Persona
Yin is a busy doctor who wants to quickly and easily plan her wedding catering menu, all within the app, on her schedule, because her schedule doesn’t allow her to meet with caterers in person.
✔ Goals:
- Improve work-life balance
- Have a simple, hassle-free and stress-free wedding
- Better manage their time on more important things like self-care after stressful day of work
✔ Frustrations:
- “I hate having to call catering places to get specific details”
- “I don’t have time to try or pick out every menu item”
- “I just want to tell someone how many people are coming and they do the rest”
✔ Short Biography: Yin and her fiance are both doctors that have stressful, demanding schedules that don’t allow for much sleep. Although brilliant in their jobs, they are not tech savvy or have the patience to learn. They want to easily and quickly put together the catering menu through an app. They are irritated that they have to call/meet with catering to learn about their availabilities, pricing, and details about what is included in their catering package. They just want a simple wedding without the pizzaz: say their vows and have some food afterwards.
“My job is demanding and stressful enough so I need everything else to be as simple as possible.”
Yin
Ideation
By simplifying the customization process into a three-step diagram and placing the ‘Customize Your Menu” call to action front and center, the user can quickly understand how the app works and get started with the customization or jump into browsing food and drink options.
The menu options were designed to address the user pain points around cost transparency and dietary restrictions. For instance, the filtering options allows the user to quickly find food and drink options that will meet the dietary needs of the user’s guest. Also, each item includes a price/person breakdown. In addition, the simple and organized meal categories also allow the user to quickly view and select items for each course of the meal.
In the initial ideation process, the focus of the design was on the customization functionality and the ability to browse foods and drinks to entice the user to explore. The goal was to design something simple and intuitive to allow users to quickly view food choices, filter by dietary restrictions, put together a catering menu, and pay for the catering all within the app.
04.
Users found the app to be beautiful, easy, intuitive, and straightforward
Users want a common list of allergies
Users wanted more interactive components to prototype: e.g. ‘add to cart’ functionality
Users want the quantities to be pre-populated based on number of guests
Round 1 Findings
Usability Studies
The first round of usability studies discovered that users wanted more pre-populated items to help plan the wedding catering menu. Whereas, round two studies found that the majority of users thought the app was beautiful and intuitive and a minority of users requested only minor changes to prototype functionality and text.
The interviews revealed that while budgets are important, users wanted to quickly and conveniently put together a catering menu from a list of food options that would meet their guests' dietary restrictions and had price transparency. Users wanted to limit their in-person meeting with the caterer and conveniently communicate changes to the menu throughout the planning process.
Users want to add discount / promo codes
User wanted more clarity on dietary icon meanings
Round 2 Findings
Pre-populated Quantities
List of Allergies
Promo Codes
Interactive
Labels
Easy & Intuitive
Participants:
Research Goals:
The goal of the usability studies was to determine if users can quickly and easily complete the core task of planning and paying for a catering menu for the wedding within an app.
Research Details:
I performed two moderated usability studies, remotely, in which participants completed the task of planning and paying for a catering menu on their own.
Outcome:
Five participants, who are either planning an upcoming wedding or have experience planning a wedding catering menu, aged 20-50 years old.
Design
- Users have a lot of uncertainty when planning something so the app needs to provide more pre-populated options with recommendations to help users plan confidently
- Users become overwhelmed by having too many options - e.g. too many food choices
- Users appreciate and remember high quality pictures
Conclusions
“I was able to complete what felt like a mentally challenging thing in a very easy format. I'm done with that and I can check off one big item for the wedding -- and I did it all on my phone.”
With the majority of their time spent working at their jobs, busy professionals will now have the time and flexibility to plan the perfect catering menu for their weddings without having to meet with a caterer in-person. This app could streamline the entire catering menu planning for any special event and could be a powerful tool for caterers to streamline a large portion of their business.
Learnings
Impact
