As a Master’s student at the University of Georgia, I was tasked to identify an app that I thought was poorly designed, in addition to provided a poor user experience (which is a poor design). I selected a local to Athens Southwestern food franchise, Barberitos.

Since 2000, Georgia-based Barberitos has been a trusted Southwestern food franchise, committed to maintaining the highest standards of serving clean, fresh, and high quality food. You won’t find freezers or microwaves at Barberitos locations because fresh products are delivered and hand prepared daily. Priding itself on maintaining the highest industry standards, Barberitos refuses to let its commitment to clean, fresh, and high-quality food suffer as a result of its rapid growth.

Because of Berberitos’ (a.k.a. “Barbs”) commitment to maintaining the highest industry standards, I feel their app should also reflect those same principles. As a user of the Barbs app and an industry professional, it’s clear the Barbs app could use a little help. It’s a great start to user convenience, but the app could be more user friendly, as well as follow best practices for mobile app development more closely.

A redesign of this app would allow Barbs to expand their user base, encourage its current users to use the app more frequently, and it would provide a better overall experience for current users, which in result increases “brand love.”
The main research question we’re looking at is essentially: What would encourage more customers to use the Barberitos app?

When thinking about the features the current app included and the features that it lacked that would make me use it more frequently, I thought of an option to order online (which you can currently do if you visit the Barbs website), view the menu (again, which you can do if you visit the barbs website), and to find the location closest to me, just to name a few.

The first phase of the re-design is to perform a UX study to ensure that the features I wanted were also features that others could benefit from. So, I developed a UX research protocol, which you can view here.

The next phase of the re-design is to take a look at the current site map and re-configure paths and tasks that could be added or made more user friendly to ensure a more positive user experience. You can view the current site map here, and also view the task flow here.

The last phase of the re-design (at least for the purpose of this project) is to create a prototype, which you can view below. This prototype was developed using MarvelApp, in addition to Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign.