STATISTICS

To begin with, I found some statistics online.

Target Audience

Market Summary 1

• Most people prefer to eat hot pot in winter because it can feel warm.

• 40.2 percent of Chinese usually eat hot pot with friends, while 17.6 percent use the occasion for a family reunion.

• 20.4% and 14.6 % are focused on cuisine from Sichuan province and Chongqing.

Market Summary 2

• Number of hot pot restaurants in China in 2013 and 2017 with a forecast for 2022.
  

• In 2017, China had around 300 thousand hot pot restaurants nationwide. About 13,000 new hot pot restaurants opened that year. Hot pot is a traditional Chinese cooking method of mixing various ingredients in boiling broth at the dining table.

Market Summary 3

• The hot pot sector alone swallowed up over 20 percent of market share in China's catering sector last year.

• The hot pot industry exceeded 870 billion yuan (US$125.7 billion) in sales revenue in 2018.

• The hot pot market could rocket to around 960 billion yuan by the end of 2019.

• There were 516,000 hot pot restaurants in the country by the third quarter of 2019, growing rapidly by 11.6 percent year-on-year.

Competitors

Based on my research, I conducted a competitor analysis to understand what are the existing market is offering to their customers and what might be missing from them.

Yelp is a business review website, founded in 2004, including businesses in restaurants, shopping centers, hotels, and other fields. Users can score merchants submit comments and exchange shopping experiences on the Yelp website.

Haidilao, founded in 1994, is a hot pot shop mainly engaged in Sichuan style hot pot, which integrates local hot pot characteristics.

Ximalaya, a listening software. Professional audio sharing platform, a collection of audio novels, historical stories, and other hundreds of millions
of audio.

User Interview

I have had three interviews with users. I asked them questions regarding what they wished to see Chinese hot pot info and their hot pot eating habits.

ARIEL ZHANG

- She knows a little bit history about Chinese hot pot
- She doesn't like spicy hot pot

LISA WU

- She is not very familiar with the history of hot pot.
- She likes to eat spicy hot pot
‍

TINA TAO

- She doesn't know much about the historical background of hot pot
- She prefers tomato pot, chicken soup, seafood soup. Occasionally, she eats spicy hot pot.

Personas

After combining all my research findings, I have developed 2 personas (Mario, Tina ) to define users challenges and goals. They are essential for me to identify user needs and make design decisions.

Solution

Based on my findings, I recognized the customers' needs for:

IA Map

To get a general representation of my website, I have drawn out an IA map. This can help me understand the flow and features of my website easier.

User Story + User Flow

After defining the key features of my website, I have created 3 user flows and user stories to examine the history articles, use timelines and find
local authentic restaurants.

user testing

I then began to sketch out the wireframes for my project and began my user testing with classmates. I did a total of six user testing on Zoom.

LOW-FI WIREFRAMES + TESTING

Here are some key feedbacks that I got from my user testing on
my low-fi wireframes:

TASK summary

• Navigation has history and timeline, these two options
  makes confusing.

• May try to fix make these two columns the same height size.

• Making quiz button smaller.

mid-FI WIREFRAMES + TESTING

Based on the feedback I received, I then came up with a med-fi wireframe. I started to add something new and also came up with some new ideas. Making the website more enjoyable. I did a few more user testing on the new wireframes. Here are some key takeaways:

USABILITY TESTING

Major Changes:

• Adding five landmarks on the right side timeline
• Use landmarks icon to only keep the main region
• Remove the left side these two icons

Major Changes:

• Rethinking the text layout
• Making two columns

MAIN FEATURES

One of the region flavor hot pot section

• Users are easy to change location
• Users can find legend stories and some relevant restaurants
• Users can easily find the history story behind hot pot

Hot pot timeline

• Users can able choose which region's hot pots history they want to know
• Users can use a timeline map to easily understand which history dynamic year

INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE

Here is the interactive prototype that I created using Figma, and then, each user flow have each prototype.

Prototype 1

Prototype 2

Prototype 3