Food to Food

Info

Taiwan has been a popular country for tourists to visit during recent years. One of the appealing factors is the food culture of Taiwan. However, many Taiwanese cuisines contain unique names that can be difficult for foreigners to understand the kind of food and tastes.

User Journey

An important step is a choice between sorting with ‘Region’ or without ‘Region’ to determine the combination of food representation.

Wireframes

Showcasing a Taiwanese cuisine through two combinations of tastes from another country that are more familiar to the user.

It is important to visually present the combinations of food and the Taiwanese cuisines clearly to the users.

Functions

Food to Food contains three core functions:

• Diversified browsing and retrieval methods
• Innovative food interpretation
• Accumulate data through users

These core functions aim to provide an overall better user experience in the Food to Food application.

Challenges and Solutions

The team met some challenges through the combinations of food from other countries that would present similar tastes to Taiwanese cuisines. For example, describing Taiwanese port belly buns (Gua bao) through western food such as peanut butter sandwiches with ribs. Therefore, some interviews were given to foreigners from different countries that have tasted some Taiwanese cuisines to collect initial data for the Food to Food application.

With the idea of designing a system with a new interpretation of food, Food to Food aims to provide tourists with a tool to inquire about unfamiliar Taiwanese cuisine and understand the food’s flavour to try the Taiwanese cuisines and understand the food culture of Taiwan.

Results and Takeaways

Food to Food was selected as one of the finalists in the Vision Get Wild Award in Taiwan.

Key takeaways from this project are:

• Crowdsourcing is a great method to include user’s contributions as part of the app development process. This can build a strong relationship between the designers, users, and developers.
• Designing with different users from different cultures in mind. This can be challenging to design a platform that is going to be used by many different users with different cultures. As a result, the ‘region’ or ‘without region’ began an important step to identify the users.