Product Design
Jan 2023 - April 2023
Role: Project Leader

Project Overview

Meraki is a project that my team and I created as part of the project teams program from Design@UCI. The theme that we were tasked to follow is retail. We spent three months ideating this product, developing it, and eventually presenting the project. My team and I wanted to create a platform that gave people another option to explore and connect over food than the typical options such as Google or Yelp. We wanted to highlight local small businesses and allow participants to discover new food options.

Problem Statement

How can we find a method to create a product that is different in the current the current market? In the retail space, there is an abundance of products that are purely for consumerism. We wanted to find a way to showcase small businesses while creating a sense of community for those using it. How can we do this in a simple, but creative way?

Competitive Analysis

In an attempt to figure out how we wanted to differentiate out product, we first needed to figure out which ones were currently on the market. The main competitors that we identified were Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Duolingo.

Yelp is a very versatile application; it allows users to search for various businesses, including restaurants, hair salons, home services, and gyms. Yelp implements a review system that gives people a sense of voice and even community. More specifically, users are able to share their opinions on the pros and cons of different businesses, as well as post tips and questions for others to interact with.

Tripadvisor very polished and easy to navigate through. It allows the user to filter their searches based on many things such as establishment type, meals, special offers and prices, and different cuisines which is a big plus. Upon searching, each place has its own square that tells a little about the place with a picture, ratings, cuisine, and price range. This makes it easy for users to scroll through restaurants without feeling like they have to click on every option to check it out, the app already gives them a quick glance and then much more information upon clicking it. The sidebar menu also allows users to sign in, write a review, or post photos.

Duolingo uses a gamified format that is able to maintain its user base because it uses streaks to keep people enticed. It has a very fun and colorful formatting which makes it appealing to its users. We took a lot of inspiration from this to try to make our appliication more interesting and colorful overall.

Style Guide

For the style guide we wanted to make sure that we were consistent through the designs, so creating this document was helpful to refer to. We made specific decisions for all of the design choices for our application.

Color
- We intended to make sure that it was an inviting and fun colorway. We liked red but were concerned that it would look too similar to a competing product, so we changed the tone to a color that was more coral. The secondary colors were meant to complement the primary coral.
Font
- We went with fonts that were clean but still legible. Shrikhand was only used for the logo.
Logo
- We wanted to ensure that people knew it was a dining-related application. We also ideated the Meraki mascot, which is a meerkat to make the product more inviting for the users.

Case Study Presentation

At the end of the project, we were tasked to create a case study presentation that would be presented among our cohort for that quarter. Below is the same slide deck that we presented. One of the points that I wish that we should have changed is to make the information more readable. The excess of text on some of the slides made it harder to follow.

Results and Takeaways

Value User-Research. The main factor that I wish my team and I had done better was incorporating more of the user research into the decisions that we made. We had mostly made a lot of the design directions prior to actually conducting the research. Some of these decisions included gamifying the application. We did this because we thought it would increase retention on the product. Instead, we should have looked at the data to see what keeps users to consistently user one product over another.
Keep things easy. One of the main things that I had to keep in mind while ideating on this project was to make sure that I kept the core values of our solution in mind, especially when designing for a short-term project. We had a lot of different ideas that we wanted to incorporate and because of that it diluted the project's solution to the problem.
Best method to lead? This was the first project that I had to take charge on. It was challenging having to take the reins to teach 3 other students with varying UI/UX experience. I did my own research and reflecting on what I had learned from my mentors in my free time to make sure that I was relaying the correct information.