Preceding Cuisines 🥢🍴

To begin, it was important to research both Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City and Australia's City of Melbourne's upbringings of their own cultural heritage dishes and how they'd influenced their respective communities today. Why do they hold significance, and are they related to each other?

It was also key to understand both communities cultural influences, paving the way for researching our product users and their cultural experiences and stories. The relation of heritage dishes to the community ties with family and connectedness, so it was important to stay aligned with those ideas for our product.

To cut to the chase, we saw that there isn't a website that provides a historical information about dishes and their significance of both Ho Chi Minh City and Melbourne.

From this, our next action was to perform case studies on websites that provided a few features that's related to understanding heritage or history of any dishes. We also analysed websites that provided a storytelling aspect to topics related to food, as our current direction was based on providing culinary food history in a fun and family orientated way.

The next step was now to conduct further user research and develop user personas. Our approach was to create empathy maps for three various users to help the team understand our potential audience goals and needs.

Once we have a clearer understanding of potential users, we began researching more on Jessica and Kevin as personas of focus. Putting these user personas into user journey's helped us visualise and see how to create tailored touchpoints and content that resonate with our personas.
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The birth of our banquet table idea emerged from the family dinner narrative. We found that this addresses our users needs by providing a nostalgic experience that helps our user, Jessica, feel like home, whilst presenting dishes from both cultures together for Kevin, to find inspiration for his next dish.

From our target users who are looking for remnants of their hometown (Ho Chi Minh City), and reinventing dishes from their Vietnamese roots, we knew that we need to create a product that was engaging, educational and nostalgic not just in content, but in design.
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With a mixture of our ideas, we used various design patterns to showcase our food contents. Creating an interactive environment where the user can diverge their focus into dishes that interests them the most and ensuring that our designs fit various screen sizes on both desktop and mobile.
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The team scrambled our brains together and tried to figure out what style we should go with for Preceding Cuisines. We were inspired by styles that are reminiscent of fond memories from childhood for most; and it was that of a children's storybook vibe with a mix of cultural icons such as Pokemon or Animal Crossing. It was incredibly suitable; as we found that this style was one that aligns with our vision.
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The final result is the creation of Preceding Cuisines. Designed for both mobile and desktop with full features, details and interactivity.

The main insights I had from preceding cuisines were the importance of teamwork and coordination. It provided an opportunity to see the value of teamwork and how planning and coordinating with other team members can greatly benefit and push forward the project. I think it also solidified my empathy and listening skills in understanding the different skill sets of the team, which in turn is essential in the UX industry.
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Personally, this project has brought me a deep understanding of my own heritage. As a Vietnamese Australian, I felt more connected to this project, as splitting between the two cultures for this project was a reflection of myself as well. It was interesting to see how the two cultures I'm from share similarities and differences in heritage through food.

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