LunchBox
FALL 2018Problem
Many Cornell students find themselves skipping lunch and limit how much they eat on campus. Lunch is expensive, and interviewees said that they can’t afford to spend $10 and upwards per day. In addition, students often have back to back classes, making it difficult to get lunch in between.
Many Cornell students find themselves skipping lunch and limit how much they eat on campus. Lunch is expensive, and interviewees said that they can’t afford to spend $10 and upwards per day. In addition, students often have back to back classes, making it difficult to get lunch in between.
Solution
LunchBox is a service app that provides a $5 lunch option, by sourcing one local vendor per day, to bulk produce a single lunch option. After ordering in advance, the student can pick up the lunch from a campus location.
LunchBox is a service app that provides a $5 lunch option, by sourcing one local vendor per day, to bulk produce a single lunch option. After ordering in advance, the student can pick up the lunch from a campus location.
My Role
Visual Design
User Research
Usability Testing
Visual Design
User Research
Usability Testing
Many college students skip lunch.
Many Cornell students find themselves skipping lunch and limit how much they eat on campus.
Lunch is expensive, and interviewees said that they can’t afford to spend $10 and upwards per day. In addition, students often have back to back classes, making it difficult to get lunch in between.
LunchBox is a service app that provides a $5 lunch option, by sourcing one local vendor per day, to bulk produce a single lunch option. After ordering in advance, the student can pick up the lunch from a campus location.
LunchBox tutorial for new users
Mac’s cafe, a popular lunch spot on campus, at 2pm.
Our first contextual interview in Mac’s.
The team conducted contextual interviews. We sorted what we heard into major themes via affinity diagraming, in which we learned that while price was important, many students also believed eating a fresh, healthy lunch was important for academic success, and expressed a desire to try foods outside of Cornell eateries.
Through this process we identified functional requirements such as:
- view, select, and compare, food options and their respective prices in advance
- provide nutrition information
- connect students with local food and vendors
- allow a student to coveniently acquire food between class period from anywhere on campus
We ideated on a variety of concepts, including non-app based solutions, but chose LunchBox because of convenience and access.
We outlined the task structure that would be essential to the process of purchasing lunch via an app. This included 3 major tasks: 1) seeing what’s for lunch 2) ordering the lunch 3) and acquiring the lunch in person.
Low Fidelity
- Pen and paper, vertical prototype focusing on lunch ordering process
- User feedback was mainly concerned with being able to upcoming and past orders
Mid Fidelity
- Used Balsamiq to demonstrate interactions in the app
- Horizontal prototype, expanded functionalities
- Heuristic evaluation showed that the differentiation of functions within the menu vs. the user profile was unclear
High Fidelity
-
Used Figma to create a highly realistic app experience
- Improved navigation by consolidated separate functions (back button, home button, and user profile) into one hamburger menu
- Added shortcuts for advanced users such as favoriting vendors or lunch items
Final Prototype
Ordering Lunch
Learning About Food Nutrition and Vendor
Viewing Upcoming and Past Orders
Impact & Future Direction
One important consideration for the future is the vendor’s ability to control and share their information on the app. The current design focuses on the student’s perspective, but the vendor’s usability is just as important.
Bringing $5 lunch to students is no easy feat but the possible impact of a service app like this would lower the barrier for students who are food insecure.
One important consideration for the future is the vendor’s ability to control and share their information on the app. The current design focuses on the student’s perspective, but the vendor’s usability is just as important.
Bringing $5 lunch to students is no easy feat but the possible impact of a service app like this would lower the barrier for students who are food insecure.