Truk’d

Problem

Food trucks aren’t attached to any one location. This makes them exciting and unpredictable. In Minneapolis, food trucks are able to operate with few restrictions and aren’t required to advertise where they will be operating. There are dozens of services that have tried to display where active trucks are located, but none have had great success. This is why I developed Truk’d.

To better understand why other food truck tracking apps weren’t working, I downloaded several and did a competitive audit. I then did a heuristic analysis of three of the more functional ones, and identified three key problem areas. I initially wanted to create an app that would tackle these three problem areas, but that didn’t solve the problem of these services not having a big amount of trucks. Yes, it was difficult to leave the ordering screen from one app to return to the home page, but did I want to create an app for ordering food? No, I wanted to create an app that does one thing very well, not one that is spreading itself thin sort of effectively.

The biggest problem that I found was the lack of trucks on all of these other services. How does one entice a business owner that is able to support themself already to do extra work when they don’t necessarily need more customers? The answer isn’t to give them more forms to fill out. 

Deciding to build an app where the primary user is the customer and not the business owner helped me to consider features that the customer would enjoy and not to pass that work onto the business owner. By not requiring a lot of upfront work and rather by using a physical tracking device, a truck operator would only spend a few moments to be shown on the map.

Tracking device

With the addition of a physical tracking device, I wanted to be cognizant of how that information could be used nefariously. I considered units that were attached to the truck that would be shown as active once the truck operator opened Truk’d and toggled themselves as active, but that left a bad feeling in my mouth. I used TennaFLEET as the example in my presentation, but going forward I would like to find a small tracker that attaches to a USB port either in the truck or an on-truck computer so that the truck operator can physically opt out from the truck’s location being displayed.

Geofencing

Geofencing is a virtual geographic boundary, defined by GPS technology, that enables software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area. I will utilize the tracking device’s geofencing capabilities to send push notifications to customers that sign up for updates when their favorite trucks come within a designated distance of their current location. Trucks will also have the option to upload more attractive copy in order to entice their loyal customers to come out and order food.

AEIOU

I wanted to better understand how people choose where to get their food once they’ve already decided to check out a popular food truck spot. I decided to use the AEIOU framework to get a holistic understanding of the environment. The AEIOU method includes taking notes on the Activities, the Environment, the Interactions, the Objects, and the Users. Check out my notes and my terrible penmanship. (Here is a link to a google doc with all of my notes if you’d rather not strain your eyes)

Tracking time

While I was doing the AEIOU, I was getting interesting, relevant information, but I figured out that the more valuable information would be the amount of time that it took people to decide on a truck. To keep the time that I spent watching a person make this decision cohesive, I decided that once a person walked past a tree before the line of food trucks, I would start timing. Once they seemed to have made their decision by standing in front of a food truck with more confident body language (no longer straining to look at the menu, facing forward, pulled their phone back out), I stopped timing. The average of all of these times ended up being the driving force in my designs going forward. I did not want customers to have to spend more time on Truk’d searching for their food than they would if they were in front of the actual food trucks and weighing their options.

Information Architecture

To make sure that all of my pages flowed together cohesively, I constructed a journey map. It is intentionally simple in order to prevent user error while in the app and will hopefully include much more in the future as I continue to build this out.