Food Fairy
Designing a solution that optimizes the value of on-campus dining currency.
ROLE: VISUAL & UX Designer
TEAM MEMBERS: Matthew Lee, Ananya Srikanth, Jeremy Yao
DURATION: 12 hour hackathon
TOOLS: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Figma
Problem
“$12 for a box of California Rolls from Campus Market, seriously!?”
Many Cal Poly students see the drastic discrepancy between campus food prices with prices from any typical grocery store. Even with this inflated pricing throughout Cal Poly’s campus, many first year students find themselves binge-buying towards the end of the quarter because of excess in meal credits and dining dollars. If students have too many meal credits or plus dollars and want to trade those for cash to students who want to buy food for cheaper, it is too much work or effort to have these two market participants meet. Direct-Search market has high transaction costs— a lot of time is spent for the buyer and seller to meet, making it not worth it for the transaction to actually occur.
Solution
Our mobile application, Food Fairy, solves this problem by connecting buyers and sellers efficiently, removing the high transaction costs and thus allowing the creation of a new market.
Understanding User Needs
Interviews were conducted during the event with 10 participants.
Pain Points to Consider
How do we make this app exclusively for Cal Poly students to ensure their safety on campus?
How will students’ privacy be protected when they are not using the app?
How do we limit bad interactions between users, such as no-show-up’s, late repliers, and no-payers?
Will this app be used to organize a meet-up or to facilitate the entire process? How will payments work?
Low-Fi Wireframes
3 main user tasks
Signing up securely with dual-verification
Ordering a meal on campus (Foodie)
Taking orders on campus (Fairy)
FEATURE
Secure Sign Up
Dual-verification ensures the safety of Cal Poly students, preventing outsiders from accessing and abusing the app.
FEATURE
Toggling Location Services
Users manually turn on their location but do not need to manually turn it off. This way, student privacy is protected.
FEATURE
Chat
A quick & succinct way to communicate between users without the hassle of exiting the app.
FEATURE
Receipts
A quick and succinct way to facilitate monetary transactions between users, keeping a record of all transactions for reliability.
FEATURE
File a Complaint
If students are unhappy with their interaction/exchange with each other, they can file a complaint. After a number of complaints are generated by one person, their account is suspended. Filing a Complaint and the 5-star rating system incentivizes students to act with integrity, to raise their rating and automatically be filtered to the top of the Fairies Feed.
Final Screens
Limitations & Takeaways
In the span of 12 hours and many design iterations later, I learned that end-to-end app development processes do not finalize in just half a day. As the sole designer of my team, it was important to communicate why each design decision was made instead of impulsively designing based only on visual aesthetics. In the future, I hope to continue exploring our Food Fairy concept and completely flush out high-fidelity screens for all important user tasks and pathways, as well as begin usability testing with Cal Poly students.