Mobile Product Strategy
Customer Research
iOS and Android
Eatty: Designing a Personalized Dining App for Dietary Restrictions
Turning a difficult dining decision into a clearer, more relevant mobile experience.
In 2009, I was engaged as a product design and UX consultant to help shape Eatty, a mobile application for people with dietary restrictions.
At the time, most restaurant-discovery products organized choices around location, cuisine, popularity, and general reviews. Those signals were useful, but they did not answer the questions that mattered most to someone managing an allergy, intolerance, religious food requirement, or lifestyle-based dietary preference.
These users were not simply asking, “What restaurants are nearby?” They needed to understand which restaurants appeared relevant to their needs, what they might be able to order, and what evidence supported the recommendation.
Over a four-month engagement, I led the work from product definition and customer research through UX strategy, interaction design, high-fidelity mobile design, validation, and development handoff for iOS and Android.
Project at a Glance
4 mo
End-to-end product and design engagement
15+
High-fidelity mobile screens, from dietary profile to restaurant selection
2
Platforms designed — iOS and Android
Over a 4-month engagement, more than 15 high-fidelity mobile screens were designed across iOS and Android.
The Product Problem
Restaurant discovery was built for popularity, not personal relevance
Choosing a restaurant can be a relatively simple decision for many people. Location, menu, price, and reviews may provide enough information.
For someone with dietary restrictions, the same decision can involve considerably more uncertainty.
Restaurant descriptions may not explain which dietary needs can be accommodated. Menus may be incomplete or difficult to interpret. General reviews may say little about the experience of someone with a similar restriction. Even when relevant information exists, it is often scattered across different sources.
This creates a difficult product problem. The user does not need more restaurant information. The user needs the right information, organized around their individual needs and presented at the moment of decision.
A conventional restaurant directory would not solve that problem. Eatty needed to create a more personalized relationship between the user, the available restaurant information, and the experiences of people with similar dietary requirements.
Defining the Product Direction
From restaurant search to personalized decision support
The initial product idea centered on helping people find restaurants that accommodated dietary restrictions. Research revealed that discovery was only the beginning of the experience.
Users also wanted to know why a restaurant appeared relevant, which menu items might match their profile, and whether other people with similar requirements had useful experiences to share.
That changed the product direction.
Instead of designing a general restaurant application with additional filters, I shaped the experience around a persistent dietary profile. The profile would influence restaurant discovery, menu presentation, and the relevance of community reviews throughout the product.
This created a simple product principle:
Do not make users repeatedly explain what they need. Let their profile make the experience more relevant at every step.
The product was designed to help users move from a broad question, “Where could I eat?” to a more informed decision based on their particular needs.
Product Principles
Five ideas that shaped every screen
Personalization should shape the entire journey
Dietary information was not treated as a one-time search filter. It became part of the product model, influencing restaurant results, menu information, and relevant reviews.
Recommendations need an explanation
Showing a restaurant in the results was not enough. The interface needed to help users understand why the restaurant appeared relevant to their profile.
Relevant experience beats general popularity
A broad five-star rating may be less helpful than feedback from someone with a similar dietary restriction. Reviews therefore needed to emphasize relevance, not only overall sentiment.
Confidence should come from clarity
The product could help people make better-informed decisions, but it could not guarantee how food would be prepared. The experience needed to communicate useful information without implying medical certainty.
The experience should feel helpful, not clinical
Dietary profiles contain important information, but setting one up should not feel like completing a medical form. The experience needed to remain lightweight, understandable, and approachable.
My Role
Product strategy and experience design
I led the product and design work across the complete four-month engagement.
- Defined the product vision, target customer problem, and initial experience strategy
- Led customer discovery across allergies, intolerances, religious requirements, and dietary preferences
- Evaluated the restaurant-discovery market and identified gaps in personalization and relevance
- Defined the relationship between dietary profiles, restaurant results, menu information, and reviews
- Prioritized the core journey and helped establish the appropriate product scope
- Created user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and more than 15 high-fidelity mobile screens
- Led usability validation and refined the experience based on customer and stakeholder feedback
- Prepared the final experience and specifications for iOS and Android development
Building the Product Experience
From the customer decision down to a complete mobile system
Understanding the decision behind the search
The work began by examining how people with dietary restrictions selected restaurants and what caused them to reject or trust an option.
The research showed that restaurant selection was rarely based on one signal. People combined menu information, prior experience, staff knowledge, recommendations, and feedback from others with similar needs.
They were also frequently forced to plan more carefully than other diners. Incomplete information made spontaneous choices difficult, while a poor recommendation could quickly reduce trust in the entire product.
This led to an important distinction. Eatty was not only helping users discover restaurants. It was helping them evaluate whether a restaurant deserved further consideration.
That insight became the foundation for the product.
Creating the personalized product model
The dietary profile was designed as the connective layer across the experience.
During onboarding, users could identify the dietary needs and preferences relevant to them. That information could then shape what the application presented throughout the journey.
Restaurant results could prioritize relevant options. Menu views could surface items that appeared to match the profile. Reviews from people with similar needs could receive greater prominence.
This reduced the need for users to reapply the same filters or reinterpret generic information on every screen.
The profile also created a foundation for continued personalization. As the product gained more restaurant, menu, and community information, the same model could support increasingly relevant recommendations without requiring the user to learn a more complicated interface.
Designing the core customer journey
I mapped the experience from initial setup through restaurant selection and navigation.
The core journey included:
- Creating a dietary profile
- Discovering restaurants based on location and personal relevance
- Understanding why an option matched the user’s needs
- Reviewing relevant menu information
- Reading feedback from people with similar restrictions
- Selecting a restaurant and accessing directions
- Sharing useful information with others
Each step needed to answer a different customer question.
The discovery screen answered, “What options are near me?”
The restaurant detail screen answered, “Why might this restaurant be relevant?”
The menu view answered, “What could I consider ordering?”
The review experience answered, “What did people with needs like mine experience?”
Organizing the journey around these questions made it easier to determine what information belonged on each screen and what should remain secondary.
Designing for trust without overstating certainty
Trust was the most important experience requirement, but it also needed to be handled responsibly.
A polished interface could make information feel authoritative even when the underlying evidence was incomplete. The design therefore needed to communicate relevance without suggesting that every recommendation was a guarantee.
I used clear dietary labels, visible profile matches, easy-to-scan restaurant details, and contextual reviews to help users understand the basis of a recommendation.
The objective was not to remove all uncertainty. No restaurant-discovery application could independently guarantee preparation practices or eliminate the need for customers to confirm important requirements directly with a restaurant.
The objective was to reduce avoidable uncertainty and help users make a more informed next decision.
Making a complex profile feel lightweight
The product needed enough information to provide meaningful personalization, but asking for too much during onboarding would create friction before the user experienced any value.
I explored ways to make profile creation feel progressive and understandable. Dietary needs were presented through clear choices rather than a dense configuration form. The interface emphasized the immediate benefit of each selection by connecting it to more relevant restaurant and menu results.
This balance between information quality and onboarding effort was central to the experience. Too little information would weaken the recommendations. Too much would make the application feel demanding or clinical.
The final direction collected enough information to personalize the journey while keeping the setup approachable.
Translating the strategy into a complete mobile system
Once the product model and primary journey were established, I translated them into wireframes, interaction patterns, prototypes, and final mobile screens.
The final experience covered more than 15 screens across iOS and Android, including:
- Dietary-profile setup
- Location-based restaurant discovery
- Personalized search and filtering
- Restaurant results
- Restaurant details
- Relevant menu information
- Dietary labels and profile matches
- Community reviews
- Directions and navigation
- Sharing and supporting interactions
The visual direction was intentionally calm, clear, and friendly. It needed to establish trust without making the experience feel medical or institutional.
Reusable cards, labels, navigation patterns, and content structures also helped create consistency across the application and made the design easier to translate into development.
Validation and Iteration
Testing whether the experience made decisions clearer
Wireframes and prototypes were reviewed with users and stakeholders throughout the engagement.
The purpose of validation was not simply to confirm whether people could navigate the screens. I wanted to understand whether the experience helped users answer the questions that influenced their restaurant decisions.
Testing focused on whether users could:
- Create and understand their dietary profile
- Recognize why a restaurant appeared in their results
- Find the menu information most relevant to them
- Distinguish general reviews from experiences related to similar restrictions
- Move from discovery to a practical next step without unnecessary effort
Feedback was used to simplify the information hierarchy, clarify labels, reduce repetitive choices, and make the relationship between a user’s profile and the recommendations more visible.
Outcome
A complete product direction for a distinct and underserved customer need
The engagement produced a complete, validated mobile product experience for iOS and Android.
Eatty moved beyond a conventional restaurant-search concept by organizing the experience around personal relevance. Dietary profiles informed discovery, menu presentation, and community feedback, creating a more coherent journey from initial search to restaurant selection.
The work also established a clear distinction between providing relevant information and making unsupported guarantees. That distinction made the product direction more responsible and more credible.
Evidence
- ✓ Defined the product vision, customer problem, and experience strategy
- ✓ Completed a four-month product and design engagement
- ✓ Conducted customer and competitive research
- ✓ Created an end-to-end personalized dining journey
- ✓ Connected dietary profiles with restaurant, menu, and review experiences
- ✓ Designed more than 15 high-fidelity mobile screens
- ✓ Covered both iOS and Android experiences
- ✓ Validated the primary workflows through usability testing
- ✓ Delivered final designs and specifications for development handoff
What This Case Demonstrates
Personalization is a product decision, not just a feature
The most important decision in Eatty was not adding dietary filters. It was making the dietary profile part of the product’s underlying experience model.
That decision changed what restaurants were shown, how menu information was organized, which reviews were most valuable, and what the user needed to understand before moving forward.
It is an approach I continue to apply to complex products today. When customers have different needs, roles, risks, or levels of expertise, effective personalization should reduce the amount of information they need to interpret. It should make the next decision clearer.
Eatty also reinforced a broader product lesson: trust does not come from presenting more information. It comes from presenting relevant information, explaining why it matters, and being honest about what the product can and cannot know.