Cornell AppDev
Eatery Blue:
Stay on top of your favorite munchies.
The ultimate Cornell dining app with real-time updates.
Role
UX Designer
Team
2 Designers
8 Developers
1 Product Manager
2 Marketers
Duration
Feb - June 2024
Tools
Figma
Notion
Slack
Context
Eatery Blue is a crucial tool for Cornell students, consolidating information from all campus eateries into one easy-to-navigate platform. Active for the past decade, the app provides real-time updates on eatery hours, menus, and special offerings, helping students stay informed about their dining options. With such a large and diverse student body, the app plays a significant role in daily campus life by simplifying access to food-related information.
The Problem
The app remains equal to everyone who have different dining preferences.
While Eatery Blue effectively provided essential dining information, it lacked a personalized experience, leading to inefficiencies for users. The core issue revolved around the lack of personalization in how the app catered to students’ unique dining preferences and schedules. Several key challenges emerged from this:
Tracking Favorite Menu Items
Students who had specific favorite dishes or eateries often struggled to know when and where their favorite items were available. Many students wanted a feature that allowed them to save their favorite meals and receive timely updates on when those items were available.
Low Engagement and Lack of Personalized Information
Although the app was widely used, it primarily functioned as a static tool for obtaining information rather than a dynamic, engaging platform. There was a need to shift from a purely informational app to one that could proactively cater to individual preferences and provide a more interactive, responsive experience.
Solution
Users give input, the app actively informs them.
Favoriting & Notifications
To solve these problems, I focused on developing two interrelated features that would make the app more personalized and user-friendly: Item Favoriting and Notifications.
Item Favoriting:
This feature addresses the first problem—tracking favorite meals. It allows students to “favorite” specific menu items or entire dining halls, creating a personal list of preferred foods and places. This list gives students quick access to their favorite items without having to sift through daily menus. This also empowered them to tailor their experience based on their own preferences, making the app feel less like a static repository and more like a customized tool.
Notifications:
The notifications system was designed to complement the favoriting feature by solving the scheduling issue. Students can opt-in to receive notifications when:
Their favorited item appears on a menu in any dining hall.
Their favorite dining hall opens for the day.
Special events or limited-time menu items are available.
By proactively informing students of changes related to their preferences, the notifications system ensures they never miss out on meals they love, making the app feel more intuitive and responsive.
Design
To ensure these new features fit seamlessly into the existing interface, I made several deliberate design choices:
Favoriting Feature
Seamless Integration
One challenge was adding a new feature without disrupting the simplicity of the app’s interface. I chose to integrate the favoriting feature directly into the menu list and eatery cards, allowing users to tap a small star icon next to menu items or dining halls they want to save. This placement makes it visible but not obtrusive, and maintains the minimalistic design system.
Quick Access to Favorites
I added a dedicated section for favorited items that is accessible from the home screen. This ensured that students can quickly access their favorited items or dining halls on a single page. I employed tabs to separate the list of favorited menus vs eateries so that users can tap to see the differentiated list of favorited items. It
Items could be removed from this page by simply tapping on the star icon on the item.
Notification System Design
Reducing Intrusiveness
A key design consideration was preventing notification fatigue, so I had to decide how the notifications would be sent. Students would receive notifications only when their favorite dish was served at a nearby dining hall, or a notification about a dining hall opening would only be sent close to mealtime. This approach keeps notifications relevant and timely, ensuring they are helpful and not annoying.
I first designed a page dedicated for notifications that is directly accessible from the home page with a bell icon button, then explored different ways to display the notifications.
Revamps
In addition to the introduction of new features, the team decided to bring back or revise some features that were in previous versions of the app, but were removed over the past semesters. This was based on user feedback we gathered through forms on the team website and in the app, as well as popular opinions we often encountered on Reddit and Sidechat.
Viewing Upcoming Menus
"Upcoming Menus" was a feature that was already implemented last semester. It was a feature that was deemed very effective for users that liked to plan meals in advance. However, most users had trouble navigating to this feature from the page of a specific eatery due to the visual design of the corresponding button. It simply did not seem like a clickable button in the first place.
The "Open Hours" button also had a similar issue. This button, located in each details page of an eatery, showed the open hours of the eatery for that day before being clicked. When clicked, it showed a list of the open hours of the eatery by the day of the week. I decided to combine the information accessible from these two separate buttons into a single modal, and create a new button that is more visually intuitive.
I decided to combine the information accessible from these two separate buttons into a single modal, and create a new button that is more visually intuitive.
Menu Tabs for Different Meal Times / Eatery Wait Times & Hours
Users also wanted to bring back the "Mealtime Tabs" feature in order to easily switch between menus that changed based on the meal times on the eatery details page. Viewing different menus was also possible via the "Upcoming Menus" button, but in the process of redesigning the user flow to access the feature I decided to bring back the menu tabs so that users wouldn't have to take multiple steps just to view the menu for a different meal time. For cafés and other eateries that don’t have time-based menus, the team chose not to implement this feature, keeping the interface streamlined and preventing unnecessary clutter.
Additionally, users wanted to see what the wait times were for eateries so that they could accordingly schedule their meal times. I introduced this information on the eatery cards on the home screen and in the details page for each eatery. This meant that there was more information I had to display in the details in addition to the new button. I made multiple explorations how to convey all information effectively without cluttering the interface.
The Final Prototype
Plan your meals ahead in just a few steps.
Users can easily switch between different meal times and see the corresponding menus, view wait times, and change the date to see future menus for a specific eatery.
Users can receive notifications when their favorited items are served, and can navigate to their "Favorites" page from these notifications or from the home screen. At this page, users can switch tabs to see separate lists of their favorite eateries/menu items. For the menu items, they can see which eateries are serving them on that day.
Takeaways
Because Eatery was already a well-established app, it sometimes felt daunting to make big changes to the already-existing interface. Even I was a frequent user of the app since my freshman year before I joined AppDev, so I couldn't help feeling like the app was already doing just fine. If the app is usable, and if we already have so many users, didn't that mean there isn't much space for change? However, as I conducted user research and explored the app's interface further, I realized that despite how Eatery was doing "fine", there was always more potential for it to become even better. The project helped me further realize the importance of user research conducted on a regular basis, especially for more long-term projects that can become stagnant, as well as how extensive design thinking is needed to discover the best possible solution for a seemingly simple problem space.