I hope you are hungry
Project description
During my graduation project, I was involved in De Bestel App, a digital platform aimed at restaurants. My focus was on optimizing how restaurant owners can present themselves, maintain better contact with customers, and at the same time benefit from low commission costs. I studied various platform models and conducted target audience analyses.
Then I translated my insights into concepts, wireframes, and an interactive prototype. The project combined strategy, UX design, and business thinking to create a realistic and user friendly solution. Through this project, I demonstrated how design can contribute to both user experience and business value.
Design Process
The development of Story Bite followed a structured and iterative design process. Starting from the initial briefing, the project moved through multiple research, analysis, ideation, and validation phases, gradually evolving toward a refined high fidelity prototype. During the project, I worked with an iterative design cycle, where I continuously moved between action, research, insights, and next steps. Each iteration generated new findings from user testing and research, which were then translated into design improvements for the next cycle. This ongoing loop ensured that the design evolved gradually and was consistently validated against real user feedback.Affinity mapping was used within this process to cluster qualitative data from interviews and tests, helping to identify patterns and key themes that informed design decisions.
The process began with the briefing and debriefing, where the initial problem space of De Bestel App was explored. This was followed by an analysis of the current and desired situation to understand the gap between how the platform functions today and how it could better support small restaurants.
To deepen this understanding, I conducted a SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, and stakeholder mapping. These methods helped identify internal strengths and weaknesses of the platform, as well as external opportunities and threats within the market. Additional techniques such as the Golden Circle, 5 Whys, and extreme user profiles were used to uncover deeper motivations, behaviours, and underlying problems from both restaurant owners and customers.
In this phase, I conducted interviews with the client, restaurants, and platform users to validate early assumptions. These insights were combined with service analysis, pricing and data analysis, and an in depth review of competitors such as Thuisbezorgd and Sitedish. A platform analysis and comparison between De Bestel App and other platforms like Bol.com and Thuisbezorgd helped to better understand how large digital platforms structure visibility, trust, and user experience.
Based on all gathered insights from research, interviews, and platform analyses, the core problem was further refined into multiple focused design questions. During this phase, I translated broad findings into a clearer and more actionable problem definition, which helped to narrow the scope of the project and create direction for the design process. From these refined questions, I developed clear design goals and design principles.
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These principles acted as guiding rules throughout the rest of the project, ensuring that every design decision remained aligned with the needs of both small restaurant owners and end users. The main focus was placed on improving visibility, strengthening restaurant identity, and creating more meaningful interaction between restaurants and customers within the platform. design decisions were grounded in real user needs and behaviours.
In addition, customer journeys were mapped in detail to better understand how users currently interact with De Bestel App across different touchpoints, from discovery and browsing to ordering and post-purchase engagement. These journeys highlighted key friction points where restaurants were not sufficiently visible or where their identity was lost within a purely transactional experience.
By analysing these moments in the journey, I was able to identify specific opportunities to enhance storytelling, improve profile visibility, and create more space for restaurants to communicate their unique identity. This defined the foundation for the concept development phase and ensured that the following.
The ideation phase focused on translating the insights from the research and define phases into concrete design directions. At this stage, I explored multiple possible solutions to the identified problem of limited restaurant visibility and weak identity representation within De Bestel App.
Several concepts were developed and iterated upon through sketches, wireframes, storyboards, and mid fidelity prototypes. This allowed me to quickly visualise different approaches and evaluate how each direction could potentially solve the core design challenge. The focus was not only on functionality, but also on how each concept could support storytelling, improve discoverability, and strengthen the presence of small restaurants within the platform.
Concept 1 was the first developed direction. This concept was further refined, tested with users, and presented through a poster and final presentation. Feedback from this concept helped identify key limitations and improvement areas, especially in terms of engagement and flexibility for restaurants to express their identity.
Concept 2 introduced the Story Bite direction, which shifted the focus towards a more dynamic and social approach. This concept explored the idea of a content feed for restaurants, where they could share updates, stories, promotions, and other forms of communication directly with their customers. Story Bite aimed to give restaurants more control over how they present themselves, while making the platform more engaging and content driven for users.
In parallel, additional platform research and interviews with platform experts were conducted. These helped refine the understanding of how large scale digital platforms manage content, visibility, and user engagement. Insights from platforms such as these informed decisions around structure, hierarchy, and interaction patterns within the concepts, ensuring that the designs were grounded in proven platform mechanics while still addressing the specific needs of small restaurants.
Each concept went through multiple rounds of testing and validation. Feedback was collected from restaurant owners and users through interviews and usability testing sessions. Based on this feedback, concepts were iterated and improved continuously. Concept 2 in particular evolved significantly through sketching, wireframing, and mid-fidelity prototyping, followed by repeated testing cycles to refine structure, content hierarchy, and usability.
After several iterations, the concept was developed into a high-fidelity prototype. This phase focused on refining the visual design, interaction patterns, and overall user experience. Additional testing was conducted to validate the final design decisions and ensure that the solution aligned with both user needs and the original design goals.