Curd & Curry

Key Focus area

1. How do Indians in Paris choose an Indian restaurant?
2. How do they search for an Indian restaurant? (what platforms do they use)?
3. What criteria do they have in mind before making their choice? (to understand the characteristics of what constitutes as Indian taste)
4. What are their pain points with the actual platforms they use?

These findings helped me to shape the direction in product development.

Key Findings

1. Menu is too generic on digital platform and poor in diversity - Regional Food Filter
   In major browsing/ordering applications in the market, there is no option in the filter provided to choose an Indian restaurant by their speciality or dishes of a particular Indian state . All the restaurants are categorized under the umbrella heading "Indian Pakistani Halal" restaurant. I identified opportunities to build a product where a sub-Indian food filter is available.
   “In Paris, you don't have a variety of Indian food, even if it is there you cannot find it on google.” Participant 5
2. Ratings for Authentic Taste
   The survey revealed that for the target audience the most important criteria is Authentic taste. The target audience wishes to see ratings based on the above criteria.
3. Certain Information is elusive
   In order to have a richer and diverse experience of Indian restaurants beyond the generic menu i.e the dishes served are unique, a speciality of a state or authentic in nature. One must have a large friend circle or subscribe to a Facebook group of the community.
   “Regional restaurant you come to know through friends, cannot find the information on google maps.” Participant 7
4. Information about Indian restaurants serving strictly vegetarian food is not available.
   indians in Paris, when searching for Indian vegetarian/vegan restaurants, find it very cumbersome as search results often include all the restaurants irrespective of whether their focus is on vegetarian or not. Most of them are meat-oriented and have few vegetarian side dishes.
   “When I put veg restaurants only veg restaurants should pop up not meat restaurants who have veg as a side dish.” Participant 2

Advantage of Hybrid research tools - Quantitative & Qualitative.

1. It helped me to reconfirm that the patterns thus emerged from qualitative interviews actually scale up.
   72% of users reported that information about good & diverse restaurants is elusive.
2. Verification of qualitative data incase there has been bias during recruitment.
   It revealed a dichotomy in the data. On one hand, during the interview, vegetarian food selection seemed an important aspect, dealt miserably by actual food apps. On the other hand during the survey, the data revealed that it's not that important of a criterion.
   As per the survey, very few people care about the criteria. 19% of the people surveyed revealed that they were vegetarian. Only 16% wanted ratings for vegetarian food.
3. Other Key Findings which were not present in qualitative user research
   It revealed another key finding; people really cared for authentic rating besides general service rating (as it appears in most of the apps)
   89.5% of users indicated that restaurants classified as per authentic rating would consequentially improve their browsing & selection experience of Indian restaurants.

Ideation

Following the user interviews and survey data analysis, I synthesized the findings and was able to create a detailed user flow and persona. Both helped me to establish a sound grounding for the ideation and feature prioritization process.

Some Features to be implemented

1. Creating a crowdsourced information database
   People fill in the restaurants they liked themselves, tag the dishes based on region and rate the food and restaurant as per authenticity & general rating.
2. Have recommendations through following/followed feature
   People can get recommendation on their home page based on the people they are follow.
3. Special occasion dishes
   India has numerous festivals. Some restaurants offer special menus or deals.
4. Creation of cards in their journals of restaurants they visited and rated.

Testing of Prototypes

The prototype was tested at 3 stages for the usability testing of the Red Routes and Key Points on those Red Routes.

1. Very Low Fidelity Prototype - Paper Prototype - Tested with 2 Users
2. Low Fidelity Prototype on Zoom (moderated User Testing) - Tested with 5 Users
3. High Fidelity Prototype on Lookback moderated prototype testing - Tested with 11 Users

Learning and Next steps

Constraints

Due to a lack of budget, I couldn't recruit a variety of users for interviews. So the trends and patterns might have convenience bias.
For the survey, unfortunately, 70 people filled the form. This is a small number to make definite statements. So, the findings need to be re-verified and checked for their scale & representation.
I worked solo for the ideation process. Having a team would have brought in new ideas and different approaches. I did push my creativity to the maximum but it can never substitute for 8 different minds.

Next Steps

The next step would be to develop an MVP of the application in order to analyse the adoption rate.
It would be interesting to run another usability test with more than 10 users (unmoderated usability testing) for Home and Dish selection pages. From there, either the feedbacks are positive, we launch the application and start analysing the adoption rate, engagement etc., or we need to return to sketching and refining the prototype.