The Problem
Every visit,
manual search.
The existing UCSD dining app gave students with dietary restrictions no efficient way to find suitable meals across campus. Every visit meant checking each dining location one by one.
A fully working prototype includes dietary preference defaults, cart, checkout, and order history — all within UCSD's official brand system (navy, gold, turquoise).
Key Design Decisions
Filtering as
navigation.
The original app treated dietary filtering as an afterthought — a filter buried in settings that reset on every session. The redesign makes it the first interaction: dietary preferences set upfront, applied persistently across the whole session.
The real-time item count per location ("3 matching items") was the core insight. It converts the app from a menu browser into an efficiency tool — students with narrow dietary needs can make the decision before committing to a walk across campus.
Prototype Scope
Full flow,
real interactions.
The prototype covers the complete dining flow: filter selection, location browsing with real-time counts, individual location menus with dietary tags on each item, cart management, checkout, and order history. It runs in the browser with no install.
Staying within UCSD's official brand system (navy, gold, turquoise) was a constraint from the start. The design had to feel like an official UCSD product, not a student side project.