AggieMenus: The improved dinning commons menu for UC Davis students
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
April 2024 - ongoing
Team
Product Manager
Product Designer
Software Engineers (3)
Context
As a UX designer at UC Davis, I took on the challenge of improving the dining commons experience for our 30,000+ student population.
Students were struggling to effectively plan their meals, track nutritional information, and manage dietary restrictions across multiple dining locations. The existing menu website - run by the UC Davis Student Housing and Dining Services - was unorganized and lacked easily accessible nutritional information, leading to frustration and inefficient meal planning.
Objective
Our goal was to create a mobile-first solution that would streamline the dining experience while accommodating diverse dietary needs and preferences.
Access AggieMenus on your mobile device!
User research: 98 interviews at the Segundo Dining Commons
My team and I took to researching on the front lines - collectively, we interviewed around 100 people eating or in line the Segundo dining commons.
Our objective in these interviews was to learn how students interacted with the dining commons and the existing dining commons menu. We kept the interview brief with the following questions:
Do you check the existing dining commons menu?
Which device do you use to check the existing dining commons menu, and when do you check it?
Do you have dietary restrictions?
What are issues you have with the existing dining commons menu?
What features would improve your dining experience?
Key findings: Mobile-first design, efficient flows, and support for dietary restrictions
92%
of students primarily use their smartphones to access dining information, suggesting mobile-first design is important.
56%
of students check the menus either directly before going into the dining commons or the morning of, meaning we should design the menu for quick and efficient access.
42%
around half of the 42% of students with dietary restrictions had difficulty finding dishes that fit their dietary needs, indicating that we should prioritize students with dietary restrictions in our target demographic.
Issues with the existing dinning commons menu
Inefficiency navigating between dinning commons
Each of the four dinning commons have different menus, but they exist on separate pages with no way of navigating between them
Students want to decide between dining commons based off of offered food
Lack of support for dietary restrictions and allergies
The dinning commons at UC Davis do well when offering options for all students - this should be recognized on their menus
Little information provided at initial glance
Disorganization of food items
Ingredients that belong to entrees are listed individually
Outdated UI and lack of mobile optimization
Defining an MVP: 5 key features to address user pain points
Following our research, I worked with my product manager for feature prioritization to define an MVP.
Centered around five key features, our app would introduce seamless tab switching between dining commons, allowing students to quickly compare options across locations:
Increase the visibility of nutritional information, paired with clear dietary restriction tags and filtering capabilities.
Enhance the search functionality to accommodate dietary preferences and meal names.
Introduce a favorites system, which sends notifications when favorited items appear on the menu.
Carefully structure the information architecture to reduce steps needed to find relevant information, with particular attention to accommodating users with dietary restrictions.
Redesign the user interface focusing clean and minimalistic visual design and visibility for color-coded dietary tags, making restrictions more identifiable.
Beginning from initial conception from April 2024 to today, I have iterated over AggieMenus several times, simplifying the flow and strengthening visual branding.
AggieMenus: The better DC menu
Nutritional information: dietary restriction tags and filtering
Research showed that 55% of surveyed students have dietary restrictions, with 68% reporting difficulty finding suitable meals under the old system. Clear dietary tags and filtering directly addresses this pain point while making nutritional information readily accessible to all students to support both dietary requirements and general health.
Search for an item by name, filter by dietary restrictions
With over 19,000 daily menu views, students need an efficient way to locate specific items across different dining commons locations. The combination of name search and dietary filters allows students to quickly find suitable meals across all locations, saving time and reducing frustration during peak dining hours.
Get alerted when your favorited items are on the week's menu
Our data showed that 45% of students check menus the night before, while 30% check in the morning, indicating a strong desire for meal planning capabilities. The favorites alert system proactively notifies students about preferred meals, eliminating the need for constant menu checking and ensuring they never miss their favorite dishes.
Quick user interactions by reducing steps needed for navigation
With 92% of users accessing the app via smartphones, streamlined navigation is crucial for the mobile experience. With the ability to switch between Segundo, Tercero, Cuarto, and Latitude tabs, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner tabs, users can quickly access information during busy periods and when needing to make quick decisions.
Branding and clean visual design focused on clarity and approachability for college students
AggieMenus is a relatively simple application, so a clean, approachable interface was essential. The focused branding and clear visual design help students quickly understand information while creating a consistent, trustworthy experience that feels native to UC Davis.
Moving forward: Continuing to design features to improve the student dining commons experience
As we look to the future, we continue to gather user feedback and explore new features to further enhance the dining experience at UC Davis, ensuring that every student can make informed, confident decisions about their meals. Below are feature(s) in current iteration.
Rate and review menu items
Around a fifth of our interviewees indicated the ability to rate and review menu items as a potential feature. This addition would provide valuable feedback to dining services while helping students make informed choices about their dining options, and engage with the community of dining commons enjoyers.
Decreasing scroll time
When conducting usability tests January 2024, our team discovered that users reported having difficulty scrolling through multiple menu entries. For desktop view, we implemented grid view. This was not an option for mobile view, so we implemented a system to condense components of a dish (for example: all components in Salad Bar were listed separately, and now lettuce, broccoli florets, hard boiled eggs, etc. are listed within the Salad Bar accordion), resulting in roughly a 30% decrease of mobile scroll time.
Campus menus
With the largest campus within the UC system, Davis offers a wide selection of food. To continue catering towards a diverse demographic, we plan to launch campus menus - a collection of food options across campus to enable students to have more selections.
Conclusion: Impact of AggieMenus as the improved dining commons menu
The launch of AggieMenus in May 2024 has transformed the dining experience at UC Davis. The app now serves over 4,000 daily active users, processing approximately 6,500 menu views per day.
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