Regarding Her is a non-profit for women-owned restaurants in Los Angeles. They gave grants to businesses, provided resources for education and put on events that promote women in food. For this project, I added an interactive map that laid out restaurant locations on their website.
Created user stories.
Researched competitors.
Performed usability testing.
Restaurant customers needed a way to locate restaurants in their neighborhood. Also, Regarding Her restaurant owners wanted to know where other group members were located and information on their restaurants.
We came up with a map solution where users could quickly locate and find out more information on restaurants in their neighborhoods.
Kyle | 37 | Long Beach | Writer
WANTS/NEEDS
BEHAVIORS
Marge | 32 | Los Angeles | Teacher
WANTS/NEEDS
BEHAVIORS
Drawing from the user personas, I created user stories and decided on the tasks in bold as the ones I wanted to most directly address.
TASKS
I want to eat good food.
I want to help out small businesses.
I want to find good local restaurants.
I want to try out new restaurants.
I want to be have Instagrammable food moments.
I took a look at sites that needed to show different business locations and all of them had one thing in common - they used maps.
There was a list of locations on the left with restaurant info and images a map on the right.
This map helped me visualize the number of pins the best because it was similar to the amount needed for the Regarding Her group.
I did more research into map solutions and I came up with a few options. The factors that I considered were ease of use, pricing, and visual design.
Users could control a lot of different aspects like adding terrain or creating different layers but we didn’t need all of those features.
There was a list of locations on the left with restaurant info and images a map on the right.
Coding the map myself would cost less but it didn’t make sense time-wise to build it out. Also, it didn’t look as visually appealing.
Atlist was easy to use and the pricing was fair. They gave a 20% off discount to non-profits and it would end up costing $192/year.
I built out the map on Atlist and began inputting store locations and the first version turned out like this:
I had a meeting with one of the founders of the Regarding Her group and I got a sense of her needs and we did some usability testing.
One thing that she mentioned was that she would want to see the neighborhoods that the restaurants were in. Previously the restaurants were listed individually. The app had a ‘group’ function so I placed them into neighborhood groups.
I also came up with a workflow to bulk upload restaurant data into Atlist via Google Sheets.
I concatenated data points such as Instagram handle, phone number, description into how I wanted them to be formatted in code.
I then input data, including the card info in html form, in a different sheet that would be saved as a csv and uploaded into Atlist to create the restaurant entries and pins.
This is the map in action when restaurant entries are created.
It was fun to collaborate with the Regarding Her team to create this resource. I really enjoyed receiving feedback and figuring out how to address needs that were specific to their business. Hopefully this will help users find and support these women-owned restaurants that are local to them.
