About Yami Falafel

Yami Falafel is a fictional name based on an existing restaurant specialising in falafels in Dublin. For copyright reasons, I have changed the name of the restaurant.

Yami Falafel is located in Dublin. They are famous for making the best falafels in the country. They own three restaurants in Dublin, one in Cork and one in Belfast.

Note that I was not commissioned by anyone to do this work, this is a personal project.

The Project

Yami Falafel uses Deliveroo for their take away orders but the increasing costs of using Deliveroo has prompted the restaurant to create their own app and be more in control of their delivery services. They also want a more personal connection with their customers.

I designed a food delivery app for Yami Falafel, mostly to understand how delivery apps function and how customers order their food. This project is a hands-on practice to translate my ideas into the design of a food delivery app.

Business goals

The goal of the app is to attract new customers, retain old ones, increase the restaurant’s reach outside of their premises and ultimately sell more food. They also want to decrease the queues of people waiting to collect their orders during peak time, and know how much food to prepare in advance for collection orders.

Here are other benefits of having a delivery & collection app:

Understanding user needs

I gathered as much data as possible from user interviews, surveys, brainstorming, etc, to answer the following questions:

Who are the users we are targeting?
What are their needs and goals?
What are their habits?
Which features would be useful to them?

I conducted surveys and interviews with about 20 people who are used to ordering food online from restaurants. After completing my user research, I was able to develop two user personas and develop a solid understanding of my users. Aidan Farrell and Amy O’Donnell are two fictional representations of the real target audience data, gathered in my user interviews.

Task flows

Task flows helped me to think through the design, before a feature is actually created. They helped me to interject the user into the flow of the website, and determine if the conceptual model agrees with the user model.

Here are some of the tasks flows I created:

User selects delivery options and goes to menu
User selects menu and goes to checkout

Wireframes

I always start any project by sketching first; this process allows me to painlessly add changes and alternative solutions almost immediately. When I was satisfied with how the main features worked out on paper, I made wireframes using Figma.

Testing and Iteration

The wireframes were presented to a handful of users during the testing phase. A few things had to be modified, removed or added.

For example, the area parameters defined by the restaurant did not have any call to action and did cause problems. I added a call to action where users need to select the area they want the food to be delivered to.