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COVIX
Pandemic dining done safely
HCDE 318 User Centered Design | University of Washington
Instructors
Sarah Coppola ScD
Sourojit Ghosh PhD Candidate
Team
Karina Shirokova
Dylan Mckone
Parniyan Rahbor
Timeframe
9 weeks
Overview
My team, Innovation Nation researched and designed a solution to make customers feel safe dining in at restaurants during the COVID 19 pandemic.
This process includes:
Interviews
Personas
User Journey Map
Competitive and Inclusive Design Analysis with Google
Design Goals
Design Requirements
Storyboards
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Information Architecture
Usability Testing
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Interactive Prototype
Design Elements
The Problem
With the ongoing COVID19 variants outbreaks during the pandemic, restaurant customers deal with the uncertainty of their safety. They “are anxious of and concerned with safety issues throughout the food consumption process” (Kim et al., 2021). Our aim is to maximize customer density to keep restaurants in business without sacrificing health and feelings of safety in customers.
“How can we help make customers feel safe dining in at restaurants during the pandemic?”
User Research
Interviews
We started by conducting four semi-structured, 30 minute interviews with the goal of understanding customer concerns and dining habits. We accomplished this by investigating:
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What priorities customers have when choosing to dine-in at a restaurant
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How they define safety
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What restaurants can do to improve the safety of their space.
Eligibility Criteria
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Live in the greater Seattle area
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Dine in at restaurants at least once a month
Findings
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Requiring vaccination status promotes a feeling of safety in a restaurant.
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Some individuals experience an increased desire to be social and eat out at restaurants.
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Safety precautions such as ventilation, hand sanitizers, and moderate social distance are desired in a restaurant.
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Information on COVID-19 protocols is useful when choosing where to dine in at.
Personas
Based off of our interviews we created two personas that represent two potential user groups. We included personal aspects such as pains, goals, and desires to develop an understanding of user motivations in relation to dining in at a restaurant
User Journey Map
We then created a user journey map to emulate the experience of a user in a scenario relevant to our design solutions with various touch points
Competitive Analysis
We then conducted a competitive and inclusive design analysis with Google and Yelp. This is to pinpoint what services already exist within the realm of our design solution and analyzing how they can be improved to better achieve our goals.
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How it's effective
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Provides health and safety information such as, “Mask required” and “Staff required to disinfect surfaces between visits"
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Provides information on the service options that the restaurant offers (eg dine in, curbside)
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Extremely convenient and widely used search engine
How it can be improved
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Implementing an option for restaurants to input their max capacity and update their current capacity regularly
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This will inform potential customers as to they're wait time and also how crowded a restaurant is​
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Not just having the safety precautions that restaurants are taking listed, but also the ones that they are not
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Increasing transparency will benefit both parties as a customer may be more inclined to dine in at a restaurant and feel more comfortable while there​
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Our Design Solution
Based on our research, we developed a service that uses crowdsourcing to generate letter grades to rate restaurants for their compliance with COVID-19 guidelines. In doing so, we will give users the opportunity to understand the factors leading up to a grade and they will be able to make informed decisions about choosing to dine in at a restaurant.
Design Goals
1. Enable users to make informed decisions about what restaurants to dine at considering the safety precautions being taken.
2. Increase transparency about where a restaurant’s safety features come from and how up-to-date it is by putting the power in users’ hands by crowdsourcing.
3. Promote consistency and relevancy of COVID-19 safety features through a structured and open-source rubric that anyone, individuals and companies, can use.
Design Requirements
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Inform users of COVID-19 safety precautions taken by restaurants
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Maintain and update a rubric of King County suggested precautions
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Synthesize and condense data into an easy to understand medium/format
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Make rubric data available to the general public and services
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Crowdsource feedback from users about the restaurant to ensure up to date information
Storyboards
We then created a few storyboards to visualize use-case scenarios for users engaging with our service.
Iterative Wireframing
Lo-fi Protoype
Hi-fi Protoype
Information Architecture
Final Product
Try out our interactive prototype on Figma here
Design Elements
For the typeface, we decided on Roboto because it is professional, yet positive. This typeface aims to create an uplifting experience for customers since we are slowly going back to normal and moving away from the negative emotions that the pandemic fosters.
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For the color palette, we chose blue colors associated with the pandemic (we referred to these as hospital blue and mask blue) and paired them with a blush pink shade to represent hope and new beginnings. This way, users can get context on what our service is but have a positive experience. The black, grey, and white provide a sense of structure and organization. The neutral shades and pastel colors balance the palette and aim to create an experience that is informational but encouraging.
