🍲 Cultural Food Hub App

Community-driven mobile platform connecting Champaign-Urbana (CU) residents and UIUC students with diverse cultural cuisines while supporting local vendors. As the UX/UI designer, I led the end-to-end process—research, ideation, prototyping, and testing to design an app that enhances food accessibility and cultural awareness through immersive storytelling, local vendor integration, and community features.

Surveyed students & residents: Weekly use of delivery apps, but cost and sustainability are concerns. They prefer culturally meaningful local food and sharing meals socially. They value fast service, sustainable packaging, and authentic experiences.

Key Findings: Convenience matters, but users want more than transactions. Opportunities include cultural storytelling, price transparency, and easier discovery of local vendors.

I started where all great ideas begin: messy sketches on paper. As ideas took shape, I refined them into tighter sketches that began to tell a coherent story about how users would navigate their cultural food journey.

My low-fidelity wireframes were all about getting the essentials right. These simple screens let me test the core user flow, how someone discovers a new cultural cuisine, explores vendor stories, and places an order. I focused purely on function, validated my ideas quickly, and pivoted when something didn't click.

With mid-fidelity designs, I began breathing life into the framework. This is where I established visual hierarchy, refined spacing, and started thinking about how elements would guide the user's eye. A welcoming landing page leads to a home screen where users explore categories of cuisines and local events. Diving deeper, they discover restaurant backstories and the rich cultural heritage behind each dish. The order page maintains this narrative thread, proving that structure could support both efficiency and emotion.

Features prioritized from testing:

1. Clearer cultural categories

2. Easier vendor visibility

3. Seamless integration of events & storytelling

The final designs are where everything comes alive. I developed a complete design system and brand identity grounded in my research findings, then refined every screen from mid-fidelity with intention and polish. The experience opens with a custom logo that captures the app's cultural spirit, followed by a home screen featuring intuitive icons, popular local foods, and Champaign-Urbana food events. Users can explore cuisines through a dedicated "Try Cuisine" section and discover exclusive CU deals. Each restaurant gets its moment to shine with detailed "About" pages that tell its story, while an interactive map displays cultural food icons showing what's nearby. The journey culminates in a thoughtfully designed order summary that keeps the cultural connection intact, even in the final transaction.