Dining With Dietary Restrictions
Made Easy

The final product was delivered as a functional website. SafePlate now helps finding restaurants for individuals or groups with dietary restrictions hassle-free. All diets are unique and welcomed within SafePlate.

For individuals or groups with food allergies or other dietary restrictions, finding restaurants that cater to their needs may be difficult. Challenges arise from factors such as limited menu options, the risk of cross-contamination, and the absence of dietary labels on restaurant menus. As a result, this situation often forces individuals to conduct time-consuming research and make advance calls to restaurants, hindering their ability to enjoy spontaneous dining experiences.

Idea Validation
Our initial research indicated that very few platforms provide restaurant recommendations specifically for individuals with dietary restrictions. Before getting too far into our process, we needed to validate the problem. Based on our research, we learned that there is a lack of safety and trust involved in dining with dietary restrictions.

Key statistics:

Survey
After gaining a comprehensive understanding of the problem’s severity and overall impact, we shifted our focus to learning more from individuals who have dietary restrictions or frequently dine with others who do. We sent out a survey and received 25 responses from Gen Z and Millennials with experience dining out with dietary restrictions. The frequency of dining in a group with restrictions and the lack of transparency with restaurant menus and policies validated our idea and helped us move forward.

Key findings:
🤔 Users expressed an interest in these top 3 features: 1️⃣ Menu dietary labels, 2️⃣ User reviews and ratings, 3️⃣ Filter by restriction
👥 High frequency of dining in a group with restrictions·
🙅 Lack of transparency regarding restaurant menus and policies

Interviews
To build upon the quantitative data gathered in our survey, we collectively conducted 8 interviews. Based on the frequency and impact of each finding, we prioritized the top 5 action items from key themes:
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1️⃣ Individuals are disappointed about missing out if the rest of the dining party can order something from a restaurant.
2️⃣ Waiters may not take their dietary concerns seriously or take their dietary restrictions too seriously.
3️⃣ Individuals sometimes feel guilty or like an “inconvenience” depending on the level of business or waiter disposition.
4️⃣ Individuals frequently communicate with waiters to ask questions about the menu, seek recommendations, etc.
5️⃣ It can be difficult to find new restaurants, especially in new areas or if they want to try something new.

User Personas
We utilized our research findings to craft personas representing both a Gen Z and Millennial user: one individual with allergies and another who frequently dines with others affected by allergies. While we've addressed some of the challenges our allergy-affected person may encounter, it is crucial to consider the perspective of the friend without dietaryrestrictions who seeks to provide support.

Upon completing this project, our primary objectives are to enable users to create detailed dining profiles, offer personalized restaurant suggestions tailored to specific dietary restrictions, facilitate social connections through dining buddies, and ensure clear menu labeling using branded icons. These goals aim to enhance the dining experience by catering to individual preferences and fostering community engagement around shared dining experiences.

Sketching
In the early stages of our design journey, we delved into sketching sessions to generate ideas and concepts for SafePlate. These collaborative brainstorming sessions allowed each team member to contribute their unique perspectives, resulting in a diverse range of sketches.

Branding Colors
We chose the color scheme for SafePlate, aiming to create an atmosphere of positivity and warmth that would instantly put users at ease. Through user validation, our primary colors, green and pink were selected to evoke feelings of freshness, vitality, and friendliness.

The "Plate" Mastcot
We created each of the following visual elements to support the SafePlate brand:
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🍽️ The Plate: As part of our efforts to infuse SafePlate with personality, we introduced a delightful mascot represented by an emoji within a circular icon, representing a plate.
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😛 The Emoji: The chosen emoji, ": P", cleverly represents the letter "P" in SafePlate, adding a playful touch to the app's branding. This friendly mascot serves as a recognizable symbol for SafePlate, reinforcing its identity and making the user experience more engaging.

🥦 The Other Iconography: In addition to the main mascot, we also incorporated individual symbols to represent each of the dietary restrictions catered to by SafePlate. These symbols include broccoli for vegan, celery for vegetarian, a peanut for peanut nut allergy, and a seashell for shellfish, among others. Each emoji features the ": P" symbol, similarly to the plate mascot. These mascots not only add visual interest but also serve as intuitive cues for users, helping them quickly identify suitable dining options based on their specific dietary needs..

Tone of Voice
SafePlate’s tone of voice influences perceptions of the following features to maintain a warm and welcoming tone, the app aims to create a sense of comfort and reliability for users through friendliness, trustworthiness, and coziness. To achieve this, we strived to use more verbs and fewer nouns to encourage action and engagement.
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Passive voice example: You can create a list of dietary choices for your group."
SafePlate’s voice example: “Explore eateries that take care of everyone’s concerns."

After gathering a variety of sketches, we narrowed down our focus to the most promising ideas. We then translated these sketches into wireframes, which served as blueprints for SafePlate's interface design. The wireframes prioritized functionality and layout

Testing participants raised concerns 😕
After conducting lo-fi usability tests with 8 participants, we discovered a significant pain point: understanding and distinguishing between different restriction indicators on the restaurant detail cards or search result page due to their small size and unclear design. This realization marked a pivotal moment for us. Arguably, the most critical aspect of our app is ensuring clarity regarding which menu items and restaurants are safe for users with dietary restrictions. Upon receiving feedback from numerous users that our current system lacked clarity and intuitiveness, we prioritized iterating on this aspect of the design.

Dietary Labels 🏷️
After getting feedback from 6 participants, we found that Option 3, which includes both icons and letters for all restrictions, performed the best. Despite Option 2 being visually appealing, it lacked clarity due to issues with color contrast and intuitiveness for representing 13 dietary restrictions. Option 3 was chosen to prevent users from having to memorize icons and to ensure clear presentation of information. To address confusion about whether a restaurant contains or does not contain certain ingredients, we will include a subtitle stating "dietary-friendly options include" alongside icons to provide clear guidance on restaurant safety.

Who/What/Where Search Function 🔍
To make sense of our search function, we analyzed how Airbnb implements their search functionality. Airbnb allows users to specify who (number of guests), what (type of accommodation or amenities), and where (location) they want to stay. This approach enables users to tailor their search results to their specific needs and preferences, ensuring a more personalized and efficient booking experience.

Similarly, we adapted this strategy for SafePlate's dining search feature, incorporating elements that consider who users are dining with, their dietary restrictions, and the desired dining location to enhance the dining experience.3.5

High-fidelity
After six rounds of iterative design and incorporating feedback from our professor, we are pleased to unveil the finalized high-fidelity prototype. This culmination represents a meticulous refinement process aimed at achieving optimal user interaction and visual appeal. With the design locked in, we are now poised to move forward with the coding phase of the project.3.5

During our research to determine the most suitable API for our project, we initially considered both Google and Yelp APIs due to their open-source nature and ease of adaptation. However, as SafePlate's design evolved, it became apparent that we required more detailed information regarding specific restaurant dishes, descriptions, and ingredients. Consequently, we ultimately opted for the UberEats API, which best aligns with our project's requirements. However, due to issues with gaining access to this resource, we had to pivot. As a result, we could not display accurate dietary restrictions and menu data for each restaurant. At this point, we realized that if we could pull from a database and display that arbitrary content in our app, this would create the framework for our displaying data process. With more time, we would work to get accurate information into our database, which would dynamically display in SafePlate.