WashU Dining
Making eating on campus accessible to all students
Role
Product Designer
What I Did
Service Design, Prototyping, Research, Survey Analysis
Time
March - May 2025
Tools Used
Figma, Illustrator
Background
Telling stories is a powerful tool that helps us make sense of our experiences and those of others. Stories help us gather and share idea and information about a given topic or challenge. They inspire new design concepts, encourage collaboration, innovation, and collective impact. Telling systems stories can help illustrate problems and “points of pain,” explaining why a new experience is needed.
In this group assignment, you will work collaboratively to understand the WashU food ecosystems. You will identify the parts that make up the system and look critically at how they are interconnected to understand the whole.
(Design in Social Systems SP 2024)
Overview
Making eating on campus accessible to all students
As WashU aims to continue diversifying its student and faculty population, an area often left out of the conversation regarding equity and socioeconomic diversity is access to food, even further access to food that meets the needs of the university community
WashU Food System Diagram
Current Ecosystem: The current WashU dining structure prioritizes the on-campus student perspective with most of its larger and expansive dining halls and restaurants on the West End of campus near the 1st and 2nd year housing accomodations.
This alienates the broader undergraduate community whom do not have the same dining opportunities given their class schedule or housing.
Students with dietary restrictions many of whom still under the constraint of the mandatory meal plan, have even more limited options across campus with only 2 specific dining halls with dedicated cross-contamination free, halal, and kosher sections.
The Problem
In the current design of the dining app, users are faced with many challenges, both usability and accessibility, just to complete simple task such as finding out which dining halls are open at a given time. To complete this task users have to use outdated, glitchy, and overcrowded pages that cause high friction when trying to do anything in the app.
Most notably the slider featured on the ‘What’s Open Now’ page which is both overly complex and too simple. The unfamiliar mode to communicate time is too specific in its time increments, and paired with the incorrect scaling of the sliding bar, creates a frustrating experience. The overall styling of the app is heavily dated causing some incompatibility with certain accessibility devices as well as issues with the university’s own web guidelines.
Frustratingly hard to navigate and use
Less than enthusiastic reviews
Users of the mobile app and the webpage expressed increasing concerns over the years with nutritional inaccuracies or lack of information all together. The compiled public ratings and reviews on the Apple App Store showcase the lack of trust and usability of the current designs that has alienated students from using what could be a valuable tool.
User Research
A need for accurate, filtered dining information
Validating assumptions
Using a short survey focusing on the current design and student abilities to find specific information, we identified key problem areas and pain points in the user experience. In doing so, the landscape of the dining experience was laid out, and our initial research and grievances in the design were confounded and expanded upon.
All student participants were verified and grouped:
Living in on-campus housing within the boundary area of campus
Living in off-campus WashU owned housing
Off-campus
Priority Ranking: Users were asked “What the most important aspect to them for a menu app?” and then asked them to rank their options or (write in their own) from ‘most important’ to ‘least important’ to gauge current students’ attitudes. Then I compiled their answers to produce a ranking chart to help guide my future design decisions.
Brainstorming and Prioritization
All design directions explored were broken down into the broader steps of the design process and were morphed into stronger, focused designs that would tackle our problem head on. In a larger class exercise, we formed smaller groups of 2-3 people to engage with one area of the WashU Food system to identify critical areas. Then, from our research we connected how pain points in our designated areas affect the overall system.
From the combined research from each group, I resonated with the need for allergy transparency for WashU dining options, and the need for consistent, readily available allergen selection tools.
Interviews
Who are our users?
To further understand user needs, I set up 5 interviews with undergraduate students with diverse religious, dietary, and racial identities to complete common tasks one would need to do in the dining app. From this I analyzed the time to complete each task, any mistakes that occured, as well as there explanations as to why they made certain decisions.
5 Interviews
1 Halal
1 Kosher
3 On-campus
Personas: Through affinity mapping user quotes from 5 interviews, I found that most users fall within 2 larger groups characterized by their by their dining needs, whether that be specific dietary restrictions or scheduling. From these classifications it helps to understand how each student could prioritize app qualities or features.
From these classifications it helps to understand how each student could prioritize app qualities or features in the new design explorations.
Sketches and Initial Concepts
Sketching out initial concepts
After compiling all of my user survey and interview observations + competitive analysis of other university dining apps, I started sketching the app structure. With the prioritization of time, complexity, and hierarchy, I developed a simple iteration of the mains screens, honing in on the ‘What’s Open Now’ page, the most frequented page for user tasks.
Lo-fi Wireframes
Visual Design
Color + Typography
We utilized the WashU Brand Guidelines toolkit that is readily available online for student and faculty use. The primary color for WashU is #AB2734 which we used as the main header and bottom navigation. Black and white were consistently used alongside the accent color #E8B650, all of which are included in the extended university color palette. Each color pairing had an accessibility score greater than 4.6:1.
Courtesy WashU Brand Guidelines 2024 - 2025: https://marcomm.washu.edu/brand-guides/