Dinner Party
Eat Together More!
Dinner Party makes it easy to collaborate on meal planning for holiday gatherings, dinner parties, lunch clubs, and more. Create an event, invite guests, and use the Menu Maker to inspire your menu. Mix and match recipes to share with your guests or let them decide what to bring.
Role: I designed this app as a personal project based on research from my graduate thesis at RISD. My thesis explored various avenues of collaborative consumption, one being the sharing of food and meal prep.
Responsibilities: User Research, Concept Generation, User Experience Design, Wireframing, Prototyping
The Challenge
With this project, I explored meal sharing as a way to build social capital. Through a series of meal share experiments, I worked with small groups to uncover barriers and opportunities within this space.
1. Meal Swap 🤲🥗
4 Participants
Members of this group each brought a dish to share with others in the group, potluck style. The emphasis was variety, convenience, efficiency. This group simply swapped food, but did not eat together.
2. Cook for Others 🍲🍽
8 Participants
Each participant in this group took turns cooking for the other participants. The emphasis was on community and self-expression through food.
3. Group Prep 🍅🧀
16 Participants
Each participant brought ingredients to prepare together on site. The emphasis was on group preparation, customization, and freshness.
Insights
Overall, the community aspect of sharing meals was extremely positive. People not involved in the first experiments requested to join in the next round. On the other hand, there were a number of barriers that emerged from these experiments as well.
Feedback: This was a lot of work to organize and keep track of all the moving parts. People were often busy and wanted to be told what to do. I wanted to make sure all parties enjoyed their meals.”
How to minimize the effort for the organizer and still create a successful event?
Feedback: As a vegetarian, I was not confident that there would be many items that I could eat. It would be nice to have more choices or know what others are bringing in advance.
How to allow for customization based on various dietary restrictions and preferences?
Feedback: I am a bit nervous about cooking for others. I wish there was more guidance or inspiration for what to bring. During the meal, some ingredients/dishes felt out of place and didn’t make up a complete meal.
How to inspire and empower participants, and still create a balanced menu?
Explorations
Experience Goals
Organization: Easy to organize and manage events
Guidance: Ability to both prescribe and collaborate on shared menus
Customization: Menu customization (diet, difficulty, cuisine)
Inspiration: Balanced menu inspiration
Wireframes
The Dinner Party app has 2 primary components; Event Creator and Menu Maker. These two tools work hand-in-hand and have easy to follow steps. Menus can be designed and saved for later in the Recipe Box or assembled during the Event Creator flow.
Menu Maker Flow - Annotated
App Flow
App Screens
Menu Maker
Set menu preferences to create a custom and balanced menu. Mix and match recipes to your liking. Save menus and recipes for later or add to an upcoming event.
Event Creator
A step-by-step event planner that allows users to set event details, send invites, and set the menu. Menus can be created on the fly or imported from the Recipe Box.
