Launching a street food map of Jakarta, Indonesia
Creating an minimum-viable map feature catered specifically towards Indonesians to engage more active users
Overview
Role & Responsibility
UX Designer —
Competitive analysis, interviewing, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, iterations, UI quality assurance
Tools
Figma, Zoom, Google Sheets, Jira, Slack
Team
1 Design Lead
1 UX Designer (Me)
1 Visual Designer
1 Project Manager
8 Developers
Duration
5 Months
About
IndoChat aims to become an all-in-one social media app tailored for Indonesians by launching a street food map MVP (minimum viable product) to boost user engagement.
With solid research of the current market and collaboration with the development team, we aimed to create a unique feature that resonates with local culture and preferences.
Process
BACKGROUND
The first step of turning a messaging app to an all-in-one social media app
IndoChat is a messaging app newly entering the Indonesian social media market. To expand our user base, our product owner declared that the first step is producing attractive content.
How do we design a platform that fosters content-creation and social interactions? We decided to start out from mundane things, like food. We want to add a food map feature that excites Indonesians.
SOLUTION
A social media & interaction focused street food map
01
Onboarding
Welcoming users to the new features with cheerful illustrations and warm words
02
Discovering Posts
Find the post that sparks your interest, and check out the location
03
Exploring the map
Directly click on a pin and check the place out
04
Detailed location Info
Find address, opening hours, dietary information, related posts, and more
05
Sharing made easy
Easily share the location with your friends
RESEARCH - INTERVIEW
Understanding how Indonesians discover, navigate to street foods
To qualify our scope, we want to know how people get to know about street foods around them, how they navigate to the location or get it delivered. From our interview with 4 Indonesians ranging from 25 - 42 years old, we concluded the following observations:
Discovering
Participants discover food from Tiktok, Instagram, Shopeefood, GoFood, and Grab.
Sharing
Participants also receive food recommendations from friends and families through Whatsapp.
Navigating
Participants usually navigate to the location with Google Maps, although the exact location is not always accurate.
After a discussion with our development team, we decided to focus on the social aspects — discovering and sharing to further qualify the scope. Building a navigation system would require significant time and resources, and it could be easily substituted with existing applications.
RESEARCH - COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Focusing on social interactions while providing adequate geographical information
Since discovery and sharing is related to geographical information and social interactions, I mapped out popular apps for food discovery, food delivery, maps, travel guides, and social media.
We decided to position our street food map in the top right close to the origin— our app will offer more social interactions than pure food delivery and searching applications like Yelp and Perikulinger, and we won’t dive too deep on providing every category of geological information and navigation functions like Google Maps.
We were able to summarize our direction with this HMW statement:
DEFINE
How might we develop an informative street food map that helps Indonesians discover new places to eat, while encouraging social connections and interactions?
FUNCTION PRIORITIZATION
Identifying key functions for efficient development
With the time constraint and the scale of the team we had, it is important to prioritize the functions that is needed the most. I sorted all the possible functions into three groups, striking a balance between social interactions and geographical info:
As much as personalized content and search is valued by our interview participants, it was time-consuming for our development team to build. Personalized content requires building a machine learning model, and search required extra effort for data labeling.
Therefore, we finalized 5 key functions for our MVP that are lower in development cost and crucial to the user experience:
01 - Nearby food recommendations
02 - Adding and editing a location
03 - Sharing the location to friends
04 - Seamlessly jump to navigation apps
05 - Curated posts from experts
IDEATION
Visualizing the concept with sketches and flows
Testing & Iterations
We conducted 2 rounds of moderated remote user tests of our hi-fi prototype with 6 Indonesians ranging from 25 - 42 years old, followed with post-test interviews.
While the overall reviews are positive, we made three main changes to the design:
01
TESTING & ITERATIONS
Improve usability by offering one-click access to navigation apps from the location information screen
The biggest usability problem we discovered is that participants failed to reach the external navigation apps from the location information screen. The button was hidden three layers deep, and participants failed to understand what the icon means.
Therefore, we decided to replace the cover photo with a mini map, and add the navigation icon on the header. This iteration offered multiple entrances for users to access the navigation apps.
02
TESTING & ITERATIONS
Adapting vibrant pictograms that are prominent in South East Asian apps
When I was sketching out the first wireframes, I was mostly referencing American applications like Google Maps and Yelp, and I thought Indonesian Apps won’t be too different.
Turns out there’s a whole different style in South East Asian Apps: the use of colorful Icons is prevalent in apps like Grab Food, Shopee Food, and GoFood. Therefore, we worked with an Indonesian visual designer to design vibrant icons that attracts the eye and fits perfectly with the local interface style.
03
TESTING & ITERATIONS
Focusing on user posts + multimedia on nearby food recommendations
During our interviews, we discovered that foodie videos and community recommendations is a big thing when it comes to discovering new food spots.
As participants value recommendations from real people, we decided to display user posts in the recommendations instead of location information. The two-column layout also gives a lot more visual weight to videos and photos. The change of content and layout supported the app to be more social interaction-focused, and aligns better with the vision of creating an IndoChat community.
Final Designs
Our final design consist of 5 key flows — the onboarding process offers a smooth introduction to the app’s features. Users can easily discover posts through a curated list of user recommendations and explore content geographically using the discovering on the map feature. The detailed location information screen provides comprehensive details and direct links to navigation apps, simplifying the navigation process. Finally, users can easily share a location to chatroom, enhancing social interaction and collaboration.
TAKEAWAY
Humbling myself to different user preferences and cultural norms
I was taught that minimal design is the standard practice, but I learned from this project that this might not apply to every culture — designs that are rich with colors can be equally user-friend too.
At first, I assumed that since Indonesians use Google Maps a lot, their own apps won’t look too much different than American ones. Through user interviews and competitive research in the right direction, I was introduced to a whole different Interface style. I was stunned by how these apps can incorporate many vibrant colors, but still appear to be clean, friendly, and usable. In future projects, I would think of this experience and remind myself to be humble and curious towards cultures and fields that I am not familiar with.
IF WE HAD MORE TIME…
Including moving food stands would be such an interesting task!
Since some of the street food are sold in little stands or carts, they would move around in nearby areas just like ice cream trucks. It would be cool if there is a way to report and track where the street food currently is. It might be possible if one day there is enough users and cooperating food stands!