Role Product Designer, Graphic Designer

Responsibility UI, UX, graphic design

Tool Figma

Time 4 weeks

Team Nanxi Yang (Lead Product Designer, Branding), Jessica Chien (Graphic Designer), Ling Song (Product Lead)

Organization Send Chinatown Love

Project outline

Passport To Chinatown is a web app designed for a month-long food crawl event. It features a progress tracker, FAQ, and reward redemption.

Send Chinatown Love (“SCL”) hosted a self-guided food crawl in Manhattan's Chinatown in September 2020. The event highlights 13 restaurants, bakeries, cafes, and other businesses throughout the neighborhood.

Attendees are given a ticket for every qualified purchase from participating merchants. For every 3 tickets, food crawlers can redeem a reward provided by local partners.

Design Process

The design team and the engineering team worked in tandem for efficiency. We took to the rapid prototyping processes to ensure the timely delivery of the product.

context

SCL partnered with local restaurants and shops to host a food crawl in an effort to bring foot traffic back into Chinatown. To incentivize attendees to shop, we designed a reward system.

We must implement measuring strategies and data collection methods to evaluate the food crawl's impact.

(1) Merchants

The merchants we’d partnered with for the event. Some business owners are younger and comfortable with technology but many are older immigrants with limited language and tech skills.

User Goals

• Be able to trust SCL

• Visible increase in foot traffic

• Increase in revenue

• Expand customer base

• Little additional labor

(2) Attendees

They are local teens and young adults who follow SCL on social media. They are digital natives who are into food and culture and are socially conscious.

User Goals

• Support Chinatown businesses

• Enjoy food, drinks, and shopping

• See the impact they created

• Overall pleasantness while participating

• Sharing their experience on social media

Solution #1

Passport to chinatown App

The mission of SCL is to support Chinatown small businesses through technology. After assessing our users’ abilities and needs, we decided to design and build a web app, Passport to Chinatown. The app allows attendees to track their progress and earn rewards in-app.

With the app, we can collect data including but not limited to:

• Number of unique attendees

• Number of purchases made

• Number of rewards redeemed

These valuable insights will better our understanding of the impact we make and strengthen our relationship with the community.

Reward Redemption

While both the merchants and the attendees are required to complete the flow, the merchants do not interface with the app.

Advantages

• The app can be repurposed in the future

• Tracking process digitally is more convenient compared to collecting stamps or physical tickets

• Attendees are tech-savvy and require little onboarding

• Reduce merchants’ tasks, no tech required

• A holistic experience for the attendees

Solution #2

Social Media Giveaway

SCL has a sizable following on Instagram; many discovered our mission through it. We decided to host weekly giveaways on Instagram, for 2 main reasons:

1. Many attendees already have an Instagram account and follow us, we can leverage this and spread awareness through their personal accounts

2. To further incentivize the attendees to actively engage with the food crawl and our organization as a whole

We ask the attendees to submit their Instagram accounts when logging tickets. To enter the weekly giveaways, we ask them to make a post or story with the hashtag #SCLfoodcrawl.

Advantages

• Social media engagement

• Reaching more potential audience

• Utilizing existing platform, little engineering lift needed

• Attract potential partners/sponsors

Key wireframes

This flow shows the in-app actions. These three screens are the ones we prioritize.

The product team held an internal testing session and 22 participants attended. Our main focus was stress testing. The majority of the issues were bugs.

Design Feedback

• Loved the dim sum receipt visual reference

• The ticket submitting process and rewards redemption flow were easy to follow

• Would be nice to have a FAQ page

• Need a return button after redemption

• Add copy/update language to avoid confusion

Improvement

(1) FAQ section

“How to win awards” is more direct than “FAQ”; it shows the user what they will want to know.

(2) UX content for clarity

Instead of relying purely on the icon visual cue, “Instagram for giveaway added” assures the users that they have successfully completed the task.

(3) CTA language

“Add new ticket” instead of “add new restaurant” tells users what exact action they will take, not what the interface will show (a new restaurant stamp).

Add Tickets

The final design of the app demonstrates a continuation of the physical Food Crawl experience.

The Passport does not store sensitive information, so password protection was not necessary. Eliminating password entry also reduces the friction in the transition from physical to digital.

Progress View

We put an emphasis on visual clues as well as UI copy and UX content to help users navigate the app.

Instead of using the same stamp design, each merchant has its own stamp with its name. It helps the users visualize their Food Crawl journey.

Claim Reward

Reward Redemption

Impact

Highlights

• Over 1,000 app users

• Close to $30K total revenue*

Passport to Chinatown allowed SCL to collect valuable data from the event. These insights help the organization to understand how the event impacted the merchants, partner vendors, and the Chinatown community as a whole.

It demonstrates the organization’s drive for real results, assuring the merchants and the Chinatown community that we stand with them and are here to support them, even when our strategy may feel unfamiliar.

* Each merchant’s food crawl revenue was estimated by (average purchase check size) x (unique purchases made)

Designing for growth

The food crawl event model was designed to be reproducible. When we first developed this web app, we want it to have room for future iterations. Hence the name “Passport to Chinatown” – it’s meant to be a record of the journey, not a one-way ticket.

I handed over the designs to other designers when I left SCL. Passport to Chinatown has since been relaunched twice with improvements and added features:

• Intro popup

• Event countdown

• Rewards tier system