Mesa
Overview
About
What do college students miss the most about home?
A quick Google search highlighted the top things students commonly miss when they’re away from home for the first time at college, listed in the following order:
Home Cooked Meals
Family
Sense of familiarity
The top search result, “home-cooked meals,” reveals a significant problem space: college students crave the comfort and familiarity of homemade food. This opens up a chance to create spaces where students can share homemade meals and feel more at home.
Diving into White Paper Research
The next steps was to validate my idea further. I found an article from the National Institutes of Health that introduced me to the concept of "commensality." The following quote from the article highlights how this idea spans multiple disciplines and offers a range of benefits. Seeing how deeply commensality impacts various aspects of our lives—and knowing it is in decline—I felt inspired to create something that could help address this issue.
Commensality (the act of eating together) is studied in a range of disciplines and often considered important for social communion, order, health and well-being, while simultaneously being understood as in decline
(especially the family meal).
- National Institutes of Health ↗
Doing user interviews
With a general focus on commensality and the goal of bringing homemade food to college students who might feel homesick, I wanted to gather insights directly from my target audience. I conducted interviews with my peers, asking questions that fell into two categories: technical and emotional.
Over the course of a week, I conducted three interviews. I placed each quote on a sticky note in FigJam, and through synthesis, I was able to organize select quotes into three overarching themes.
Further understanding each theme
With these three themes identified, I explored each one more deeply to understand how they connected to the bigger problem space.
Nostalgia
Home-cooked meals help students to cope with homesickness by providing a reminder of family traditions.
Preparing or sharing a homemade meal allows students to recreate a sense of togetherness that they miss from family gatherings.
Nostalgic meals can provide emotional relief, especially during stressful times.
Culture
Homemade meals are also a vital link to cultural traditions.
Sharing traditional meals with peers can be a way for students to celebrate and introduce their cultural heritage to other people.
Certain dishes can help students maintain their cultural identity in a new environment.
Taste
You can't beat the taste of homemade food, it can't be replicated by the dining hall or sometimes even takeout.
Taste can invoke memories.
Homemade food can taste better when you someone prepared it specifically for you.
Overarching Theme
Home-cooked meals offer students comfort, cultural connection, and a taste of home in unfamiliar environments.
Meet Sydney, a college freshmen feeling homesick and missing her family’s homemade meals
Looking at all the synthesized information, I then got along to building a user persona that would be something I can always refer back to, in order to keep my target audience in mind. Sydney was an amalgamation of all the research gathered, people interviewed and personal experiences.
Sydney, 18
Sydney is a college freshman at Northeastern University, adjusting to city life after moving from a small town. She misses home-cooked meals and the sense of comfort they bring, especially when feeling homesick. Sydney is eager to make friends and find ways to feel more at home on campus.
😡 Frustrations
Misses homemade food from her culture, but can’t find it locally
Struggles to meet people from her cultural background
Wants alternatives to dining hall or takeout
Lacks the time, ingredients, or skills to cook cultural dishes
🤩 Goals
Enjoys homemade meals that connect her to family and culture
Wants to meet others with a similar cultural background
Interested in learning to cook traditional dishes
Hopes to host meals to share her food and culture with others
Sydney’s user journey map outlines her experience as she seeks comfort through cultural food and community in her college life, and how she discovers the app.
How might we…
help college students find authentic homemade meals and find a community to ease their feelings of homesickness?
Focusing on 3 main flows
Due to constraints and the timeline of this project, I decided to focus on 3 main flows for this app. These 3 flows to me felt like the core purpose of this app, which was how I chose them. Tying it back to Sydney, our user persona, each of these flows also supported her goals.
Onboarding
Guides new users through the app's key features and customization options.
Collects basic information such as cultural background, food preferences, and location to personalize recommendations.
Helps users connect with others who share similar backgrounds or food interests, setting the foundation for a community-centered experience.
Finding a meal
Allows users to browse nearby homemade meal options shared by other students and community members.
Displays meal details like menu, dining arrangements, hosts information.
Enables connections by providing opportunities for users to meet others over a shared meal, helping to ease homesickness and create a sense of belonging.
Hosting an event
Empowers users to create events where they can cook and share meals from their culture with friends or new acquaintances.
Provides event setup options like meal details, number of guests, and RSVP settings.
Fosters community and cultural exchange by enabling users to share their heritage and traditions through food, building a supportive network.
Benchmarking
Since there were no direct competitors with apps that specifically connect college students over homemade cultural meals, I expanded my benchmarking research to focus on platforms that had similar flows to what I had in mind.
Benchmarking done in Figjam. Green post-its are things that I liked and thought could be brought onto my own app, and red post-its are things to avoid.
Key Findings from Benchmarking
Since there were no direct competitors with apps that specifically connect college students over homemade cultural meals, I expanded my benchmarking research to several types of apps that served similar aspects of the user journey.
Onboarding Flow
⚡️ Fast, step-by-step setup to avoid overwhelming new users
🤲 Basic preference collection to personalize experiences
🏠 Community-focused features highlighted early to boost engagement
Takeaways: Streamline onboarding, gather essential interest, and emphasize community to help new users feel connected
Finding a Meal Flow
✨ Detailed event descriptions
🗂️ Organized hierarchy of information
✅ Confirmation to build trust and show that event is actually happening
Takeaways: Clear event information, social proof to help users find relevant meals and feel confident joining
Hosting an Event Flow
🍎 Simple event setup with guest limits and RSVP options
📐 Clear hosting guidelines to support hosts
📖 Storytelling prompts to encourage more information and personable aspect
Takeaways: Make event creation easy, include guidelines, and encourage sharing cultural stories to create a welcoming, engaging experience.
Connecting the Experience: Creating a User Flow
When designing this app, I wanted to create a seamless journey that supports students as they seek comfort, connection and community through shared meals. By integrating Onboarding, Finding a Meal, and Hosting an Event flows, the app guides users from initial setup to engaging with a supportive dining community.
This journey map brings you along how Sydney discovers the app and interacts with it throughout the three different flows.
Iterating with Lo-fis & User Feedback
With the user journey in mind, the next was creating screens for each step. Creating lo-fi wireframes allowed me to quickly test and refine core features. Sharing them with users early on provided valuable feedback so I was able to refine the design and improve usability before moving to higher fidelity prototypes.
A featured event card that underwent iterations after feedback from potential users.
Before and after of screen for more information on an event.
Bringing it to Life with Hi-fi Designs
After refining the concept through lo-fi wireframes, I moved to hi-fidelity designs to create a polished and visually appealing user experience. This phase focused on adding color, typography, and interactive elements to bring the app's brand and user interface to life, ensuring a seamless, intuitive experience.
Onboarding
Figuring out what the app can do for you.
This flow introduces users to the app with a friendly, step-by-step setup, gathering key preferences to personalize their experience while emphasizing the app's community-driven mission.
Highlights:
Welcomes new users
Personalizes preferences for meals
Conversational copy
Finding a Meal
Making connections through food.
Designed for quick browsing, this flow allows users to explore personalized meal events based on their preferences. Each meal features clear event details to help them find and join the perfect shared dining experience.
Highlights:
Personalized meal suggestions
Clear event listings
Easy booking process
Hosting an Event
Sharing your love of food.
Hosting a meal is made simple with intuitive setup options, guest limits, and prompts for sharing the story and menu of each event. This flow encourages users to engage more deeply by creating their own cultural dining events.
Highlights:
Simple event creation
Ability to manage guests
Ability to set preferences
Tying It All Back: Culture, Taste & Nostalgia
Each flow ties into the themes of culture, taste and nostalgia to create a meaningful user journey.
Onboarding
By gathering preferences on cuisine and culture, onboarding personalizes the experience to connect users with tastes from home.
Finding a Meal
This flow lets users find culturally familiar meals, evoking nostalgia and the comfort of familiar flavors.
Hosting an Event
Hosting allows users to share their cultural dishes, fostering community around shared traditions and memories of home.
Taking a quick look at the design system used for app.
The Origin of Mesa
The app's name, Mesa—Spanish for "table"—symbolizes a place for gathering and connection. This ties directly to commensality, or the act of eating together, which is at the heart of the app's mission. The letters of Mesa can also directly be found in the word.
By bringing students around a shared table, Mesa fosters community, cultural exchange, and a sense of home through shared meals.
Reflections & Takeaways
The idea of fostering a community is something that I deeply resonate with. If I had more time with this project, there would definitely be other things I wanted to look into more and develop further. Likewise, looking back at this project, there are also a lot of things that I learned.
If I had more time…
Further explore the hosts' side
Find ways for students to connect with other students
Look more into regulations and vetting process of hosts to ensure safety of students
Further explore the app's brand & identity
Some things I learned…
Think intentionally about every element. Every design decision should be purposeful
Prioritizing what's important. Focus on features and flows that have greatest impact, especially given tight deadlines.
Understanding your user, directly ask users for feedback
