What should we eat?

This is a trivial question that is asked by almost everyone on earth, as eating and consumption of food is closely related to our survival, thus we spend unexpectedly large amount of time contemplating about which choice of food we should eat.

I ask myself this question every single time as well. And every single time, I face with regrets about not getting the right meal for the right time. So I decided to design an App about it.

Live Demo:

MMJ

The Name

If you translate the phrase ‘What should we eat?’ you can translate it too: 뭐 먹지? (Pronunciation: Mo Mok Ji?) To be honest, I was not able to think of any better name, so I used the first letters of each pronunciation: MMJ. 

MMJ

MMJ is an App that tracks and keeps restaurants & menus of what people should eat. 

Whenever during lunch / dinner, people start the process of deciding what they should eat. Sometimes people get a good idea of what they want to eat for that day / moment, or sometimes they don’t. Normally people just go to where they usually go (habits) but sometimes realize they actually planned or thought of going to a specific place few days or weeks ago. Hence although whenever people get a great idea of a place for their next lunch / dinner, they still forget and eat in regret.

For more detailed synopsis of the App please visit this document.

The main idea is that whenever people have an idea of what they want to eat, they keep a memo of the idea, and be able to get back to it like a reminder.

Intro - Landing Page

For the landing page I decided to make a small nifty animation which briefly explains where I got the name from. However, it is not intentioned for users to fully understand all of the story.

Main Page

After the brief animation (loading / landing page) the user is invited to the main page which holds main functionality for this App - keeping track & listing all the restaurant that user wishes to store.

Notice the usage of tabs in the main menu - by mimicking using tag functionality I thought it would make more relevant sense to the uses that the app is more like a list / reminder app. When user chooses a category under the saved tab, the users can filter or sort the order of restaurant according to its preferences.

Detail of the list

Whenever the user selects a menu, it brings to the detailed page of the restaurant. In this section, users are able to modify the list that they’ve saved previously.

Add a list

Being able to modify the list is crucial functionality of list app as well is to add an element to its list as well. When adding the restaurant, I wanted to offer some simple guide that helps users to add a restaurant to the list.

First of all, the user is guided to search for a name of the restaurant:

Writing Reviews is also another crucial functionality for the App. Once a user visited a restaurant it would be nice if they could tick off any restaurant that they no longer wish to visit again (like a checklist app). When doing so, I would adding a review would be a good idea.

While I was working on this functionality, I thought of a system that might come in handy when actually building an App: Since this App is a list / reminder app, all the reviews and lists would be private to the user him / herself. However, these collections of information (review) might be useful to the restaurants as such information that is by the users would be honest and truthful, since these are the information that users would refer and write about the restaurant for themselves. Thus, perhaps creating a monetary policy where if a restaurant pays certain amount of money to the user / to the app and be able to see the reviews (the user profile for each of the reviews would be still private) this could actually benefit the users and the restaurant in many ways.

Profile Page

Like any other App, my app also requires a profile page since each of the lists is unique and dedicated to specific user:

Conclusion

To be really honest, creating the App was, at times, challenging as I felt that the App strongly resembles the already existing restaurant Apps such as Yelp. Even during my testing phase of the app, many of the users have definitely stated that the App does feel like a Yelp / restaurant review App, rather than a list Application that helps user to solve the objective: an App that tracks and keeps restaurants & menus of what people should eat. There were some great suggestions such as:

• For the introduction animation, it could act as a button that randomly pulls out your favorite restaurant (based on location etc).
• Cancel button during the adding process might be useful.
• Sometimes, user might not want to go through entire process when adding a restaurant. They just simply want to make a memo of it.

Creating this App gave me lots of insight about building a concept, which is a meaning behind when creating an App. I believe with this project, I could’ve developed more firm and solid concept for more solid direction of an App. Much to learn it is. Though, the funny thing is that, during the critique for this App, I actually came up with few ideas of an App which seems super fun and exciting to design. Perhaps for my next project, I should start building an App for tracking my Toilet Paper.