Thai Bites
A mobile app helping Gen Z backpackers navigate through Thailand's street food culture, eliminating language barrier.
Duration
Roles
Responsibilities
The Ask
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a travel publisher offering guidebooks, a website, and a mobile app with tips on destinations, accommodations, and local culture. It provides practical advice for travelers, emphasizing independent exploration.
High level goals
Lonely Planet has outlined their goals for our team:
Goal 1
Need a “non-sticky tool" that does not make users addicted to their phone.
Goal 2
Not about “content” but about “utility”. Helping people solve a problem, not providing more contents.
Goal 3
Make Lonely Planet relevant again among Gen Z backpackers.
Goal 4
Must be simple, and easy to use.
The Problem
Backpackers struggling to customize their street food order
Gen Z backpackers face challenges ordering and customizing Thai street food due to language barriers and unfamiliarity with ingredients, making it difficult to accommodate allergies, dietary restrictions, and preferences.
The Opportunity
Market gaps, and made to order street food (อาหารตามสั่ง)
From our competitor and ecosystem analysis, there’s a market gap for an app that guides and help backpackers in ordering and customizing Thai street food in real life for places such as made to order food stalls!
How might we?
How might we help Gen Z backpackers to communicate their dietary needs to local Thai street food vendors effectively?
Our concept
Thai Bites makes ordering Thai street food easy and stress-free. Choose a dish from our most common Thai dishes such as stir fried basil leaves with crispy pork and customize the ingredients by selecting ingredients list and removing what you don’t want. The app then generates a Thai translation to show directly to the vendor for a smooth experience.
Expected Impact
Comparing our solution to the initial high level goals.
Non sticky
There is no contents or features that makes the users stick to their phones, allowing them to fully enjoy real life travels.
Straightforward tool
The app focuses more on the function which is to help backpacker communicate their dietary needs with thai street food vendors which is very simple to use.
Fulfilled a need
Even though the need is small, it is still a need that backpackers have when traveling to Thailand where they do not speak the language.
Sitemaps
User flow
Design system
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