Regarding Her is a non-profit for women-owned restaurants in Los Angeles. They give grants to businesses and put on events that promote women in food. For this project, I added an interactive map that laid out restaurant locations on their website.
The Challenge
Restaurant customers needed a way to locate restaurants in their neighborhood. Also, Regarding Her restaurant owners wanted to know where other group members were located and information on their restaurants.
Our Approach
We came up with a map solution where users could quickly locate and find out more information on restaurants in their neighborhoods.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I took a look at sites that needed to show different business locations and all of them had one thing in common - they used maps.
Google Maps
There was a list of locations on the left with restaurant info and images a map on the right.
Google Maps
Denny’s Store Locator
This map helped me visualize the number of pins the best because it was similar to the amount needed for the Regarding Her group.
Denny's Map
Storepoint
There was a list of locations on the left with restaurant info and images a map on the right.
Storepoint
Atlist
Atlist was easy to use and the pricing was fair. They gave a 20% off discount to non-profits and it would end up costing $192/year.
Atlist
Developing the Map
We went with the service, Atlist, and organized the information, performed usability testing and put together a sustainable workflow.
Information Architecture
I built out the map on Atlist and began inputting store locations, and the first version turned out like this:
Screenshot of Regular, Light, Semibold, Bold Weights
Usability Testing
I had a meeting with one of the founders of the Regarding Her group and I got a sense of her needs and we did some usability testing.
One thing that she mentioned was that she would want to see the neighborhoods that the restaurants were in. Previously the restaurants were listed individually. The app had a ‘group’ function so I placed them into neighborhood groups.
Workflow
I also came up with a workflow to bulk upload restaurant data into Atlist via Google Sheets.
I concatenated data points such as Instagram handle, phone number, description into how I wanted them to be formatted in code.
I then input data, including the card info in html form, in a different sheet that would be saved as a csv and uploaded into Atlist to create the restaurant entries and pins.
Conclusion
Collaborating with the Regarding Her team to create this resource was a fun experience. I really enjoyed receiving feedback and figuring out how to address needs that were specific to their business. Hopefully, this will help users find and support these women-owned restaurants that are local to them.
