Outline to improve the user experience

Question

I am working on a project that is basically a search engine for food. It tells you the nearest place that serves the dish you want to eat. They requested me to make a simple outline about our actual goals, how to improve the user experience and where should we be heading.

I came up with this:

Questions

• How specific they are while searching for a dish?
• In which situation they are more likely to use the site?
• What’s their screen resolution?

Personas

• Desktop user
• Mobile/Tablet user
• Person looking for a dish
• Person looking for a partcular type of food
• Person looking for top/recommended dishes

Objectives

• Finding the dish they are looking for
• Finding uselful information about the dish/restaurant
• Finding what other people think about the dishes

Features

• Enabling users to like dishes
• Sorting dishes by number of likes
• Enabling users to comment the dishes
• Enabling users to add pictures?

Problems

• Logic between dish results and popup menu
• Displaying the dishes images

This is my first time writing this kind of an outline and I have the following questions:

• It is well organized?
• Am I missing something?
• Should I include something else?

Answer 1

It looks like you've made a great start.

You could condense a lot of your notes by using this structure:

"As a <user type> I want to <activity> so that <goal>"

e.g. "As a mobile/tablet user I want to search dishes so that I can find the dish I'm looking for"

There's an article about this technique here: http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/advantages-of-the-as-a-user-i-want-user-story-template

One main advantage is that this structure forces you to consider the end goal and limits the tendency to add features just because they seem like a good idea.

Like I say, great start.

Answer 2

I would split the list in to user scenarios and requests then construct user-driven-development statements (as mentioned by Rob - as an X I want to Y) based on the combinations.

A scenario might be something like "mobile user looking for a restaurant near current location", "mobile user searching from home for a restaurant for later" or "desktop user searching for a restaurant now" and a request might be "Find a restaurant close to me", "find a restaurant of a certain type" or "find a restaurant with an average review of n stars or more"

Some examples:

1. As a mobile user looking for a restaurant to eat in now I'd like to find restaurants near me which are open right now
2. As a desktop user looking for restaurants to eat in later I'd like to find restaurants based on an average review of 5 stars
3. As a desktop user looking for Japanese food I'd like to find Japanese restaurants within 5miles of my location

Answer 3

also a good addition to get the ball rolling is a (non-trivial) list of opportunities and threats...keeping the best out there in mind, like urbanspoon etc. maybe also a much tighter worded executive summary, where you specify what kind of food search engine this is. otherwise you have to spot this information in your lists so far. for example: this food search engine is aimed at regular foodies that regularly look to other foodies likes, combined with their own tastes and preferences. the app/website will make money by...