Drexel University
Happy Sunshine
Introduction
If I think back to my earlier years being a student at Drexel University, an image that comes to mind are the breezy, sunny Sunday mornings waiting for a cheesesteak by the Happy Sunshine food truck. I can see the smiling faces of the owners waving me over and the sounds of students playing volleyball in the sand courts behind me.
This project grew from a class assignment where as groups we were to pick a food truck we knew of on campus and design and develop an app for them, incorporating their menu, branding, and  core values of their identity. My role for this project was UI designer and supporting developer.
Context + challenges
Adapting a food truck’s menu and their working system into a digital platform posed a couple of challenges. After gathering all data that we could about the food truck from online resources and interviewing the owners and a few customers, we found that the most major challenges for this project would be:
  • Creating fun and friendly branding that matched the existing mission and image of Happy Sunshine
  • Tackling the organization of a large menu with many categories
  • Finding an incentive for users to consistently use the app
Research
Prior to designing, we had to understand Happy Sunshine as a business, a brand, and an experience. We spoke with the food truck owners and did market research with apps by companies like Wawa, who has addressed the challenge of organizing a large menu in a digital experience. We utilized a fly-on-the-wall method to learn more about Happy Sunshine’s dynamic with customers, and this paired with our interviews helped inform us enough to create a project canvas and user personas.
In addition to the research we did, we created a business canvas, journey maps, and used card sorting to gain a stronger idea of what the task flows of the app could look like.
Design
Once we had a more clear idea of what we wanted the app to provide to customers, I put my ideas of UI and branding possibilities into sketches. I aimed to draw out a warm, fun, and cheery atmosphere by including smiling suns, using clouds as a divider,  and testing out different custom imagery with a handmade feeling.
Outlining task flows was our next step–for this, I focused on the task where a user is ordering an item. I sketched out the pages we would have, the features on each page,  the actions the user would take, and the feedback the app would give during this task process.

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