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Many international residents, travelers and students love trying out new cuisines from different cultures, but, whenever go out to try something new and look at the menu, it just looks gibberish. I have to read online reviews and take risk to order something new, just to get disappointed when the food arrives. While talking many international residents and visitors like me, I realized that many are unable to explore new cuisines due to ignorance. One of them said that -
"I know this is impossible, but it will be great if someone could have shown me the food, at least a glimpse of it, before ordering ...
How can we get the look and feel of the food item along with taste and ingredient details before ordering, so that one does not waste money and get frustrated when the food item turns out to be bad.
A menu scanner app that converts the physical menu to digital clickable menu and pulls relevant information about the selected food item as per local area with taste and allergic description.
Looks cool, right! But, how did I reach till here? Here is the quick walk through of the process if you want to get into to the weeds!
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Looks cool, right! But, how did I reach till here? Here is the quick walk through of the process if you want to get into to the weeds!
I started with reaching to people with similar pain points (international students and visitors) and learned their feelings, pain points and wishes. Some of quotes from the user interviews goes like -
International student, INDIA
I have always dreamed that what if someone could show me the food before ordering, so that I may judge it before and do not waste money in experimenting with them
Business traveler, JAPAN
Every time I have to call and ask to my friends for suggestion if they have been to this place before
International student, CHINA
It is really difficult to understand the menu and food terminologies and I end up ordering same item everywhere
Priyanka, I am fed up of trying new places, ya! All these guys, write and explain the items so fancy that it looks like they are feeding us gold. But when it comes to plate, it is some ramen soup with some raw meat and green veggies. That’s it!
Experimenting new foodies not cup of my tea. I do not have enough funds to waste, I may do it once I start earning.
I see some friends trying and experimenting with new cuisines, I also want to do that till the time I am here. But don’t know what to order. And just to avoid any hustle I order chipotle rice bowl, whenever I feel like eating different, since that is something I know matches my taste and close to Indian flavors as well.
I quickly laid out the user journey map that helped me define the problem that I want to solve. This is what Tina, goes through when she decides to eat outside someday.
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I thought, how can we get the look and feel of the food items along with some details beforehand to the food lover. This triggered my ideation towards machine learning technologies which has gained lot of traction for precise predictions as required in this case. My user pain points and ML capabilities started to converge further with some secondary research.
ML Concept 1
One can train a convolutional neural network (CNN, a type of deep neural network) to extract features out of an image and match it to other images with similar features
ML Concept 2
One can train a recurrent neural network (RNN, a type of deep neural network), to analyze text and extract useful information based on our requirement
ML Concept 3
We do not need to train a CNN or RNN from scratch. We have lot of open source libraries which can be further trained to suit our needs
After finalizing the tech, I planed to sketch out some very early visuals to validate my intermediate steps. And that is when I thought of Lo-fi wireframes.
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For completion, I also created the brand identity for the product and took it another level. I selected the relaeway font face due to its performance on handheld devices. The brand colors (grey and yellow) were inspired by technology and food. The logo creation went under multiple iterations to get this look which related to food scanning technology.
I hope I was able to communicate with you in a digestible manner. If you like it, give me a call or shoot me a line/email and we can talk about how we can work together. You will see how, how I utilize my strength of deeply empathizing with the users to design veracity of products that users love. My savior skill of adaptability and fast learning is what I lean on all the time!
I'm always open for collaboration, so don't hesitate to contact me. Let's create something great together!
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