Case Study: Eat Together!

Eat Together!

Connecting college students over shared meals and common interests

Project at a Glance

Eat Together is an app designed to connect college students over sharing a meal. Founded and run by students, Eat Together promotes community, belonging, and genuine social connections by focusing on shared interests and values. Following the app's successful launch in September 2023, i worked as a member of the UX team to build and design the app's design system to improve user experience, branding, and visual hierarchy.

Jump to final designs

My Role

UX Designer

Timeline

November 2023 - June 2024

Teammates

Pim Jitnavasathien, Ellie Marsh, Mumtaz Sheikhaden

Context &
Background

Eat Together was launched in September 2023 for students at the University of Washington as a student-run startup app. Joining the team in November 2023, my goal along with the design team was to build and design the app's design system to improve user experience, branding, and visual hierarchy.

Heuristic Evaluation

Coming into the app completely new, our team began by analyzing user flows and noting key thoughts on design, workflows, emotions, and solutions. We then identified key ideas through a thematic analysis.

Key Takeaway

Through our evaluation, the largest issues we noted were inconsistencies in the app interfaces. This included typography, colors, and spacing across different pages, making them difficult to follow due to poor information hierarchy.

User Research

Beyond our initial heuristic evaluation, we also sought to understand where users were currently experiencing pain points. To do this, our conducted user interviews with 10 current Eat Together users. Each session lasted between 20-30 minutes and consisted of a mixture of qualitative questions and a usability test where participants completed a task out loud.

From our findings, it seemed that there was not one particular feature or pain point that was frequently described. Our findings, however, did highlight one key theme:

Key Takeaway

Multiple users shared general hesitations when it came to creating or attending events. For a variety of reasons, including low attendance, lack of information, and weaker in-app social interaction, many participants experienced pain points throughout the app.

Ultimately, our compiled findings related less to the app interface, but gave us valuable feedback on the current experience for many users. This guided our app redesign, allowing us to prioritize features that could help users with hesitations in engagement.

Style Guide

Typography

We began Eat Together's branding by establishing typography guidelines. As the app at launch had a wide variation of font sizes and weight, our first priority was to set consistent values.

Colors

Our next step was to establish app colors. By taking the existing color palette of the app and simplifying near duplicate colors, we were able to set consistent colors to be used throughout the app.

Components

Event Cards

One of our first changes was a redesigned event card. Based on our user research findings of hesitation and low engagement for events, our goal was to place a greater emphasis on socialization. This was done by showing other attendees, as well as enlarging the image to provide more visual detail.

User Cards

In different pages within the Eat Together app, different style cards were used to display and suggest other users.

Both designs displayed virtually the same information, thus we aimed to maintain consistency while also reducing development redundancy. Our redesigned kept profile pictures while moving bio/quotes to user profile pages, maintaining personality while removing information that often added little context.

Page Redesigns

Home

With our design system, we gave the home page an updated look. Recommended events were expanded to provide more insights while still being distinguishable from regular events. Typography and color were updated to match app-wide styling.

Event Pages

Inside each recommended event, we reimagined how the detailed view was displayed to the user. The original designed featured an expanded card view, detailing event attendees with additional information underneath.

Our new events design created dedicated pages for each event, providing more comprehensive information. Critical details were prominently displayed at the top to ensure easy access to essential event details. The expanded space also offers opportunities for future enhancements, including the integration of an interactive map to enhance navigation.

Event Organization

The event organization page also underwent a small update. In addition to typography changes, image prompting was relocated to the end of the user flow and made required. As the original design enabled users to easily skip or overlook image uploading, we sought to improve visibility, enhancing the overall quality of all events by including proper images.

Outcomes & Reflection

Reflection

My time at Eat Together was very insightful and a great learning opportunity. Working in a multidisciplinary team with both strategists and developers allowed me to collaborate outside of my immediate design team and greatly emphasized the importance of accountability and communication. My understanding of coding, in particular, also made communicating with developers easy and improved overall project handoff.

I also learned a lot about managing meeting times and collaborating in a larger team with multiple designers. Finding the optimal balance of individual and collaborative work took several weeks, but ultimately allowed us to improve efficiency. Being a UX lead gave me the opportunity to also teach and mentor other designers, which I found to be one of the most impactful experiences.

Future Implementation

I left the team in June 2024 after completing our redesigns and finalizing documentation. Before departing, our team focused on next steps, ensuring the development team could implement our design system. We aimed to streamline the work for both future design and development teams, allowing for improved workflows and seamless transitions. In Spring 2024, Eat Together also launched cohort programs, designed to build small app features, with our design system being utilized to maintain the app's branding and visual consistency.