This was a intensive group project to design how we might digitalize and/or automate services at the hawker centre, with a requirement to include mobile payment as part of the final solution.

We kickstarted our first round of research by conducting fly-on-the-wall observation in various hawker centres like Lau Pa Sat and more specifically Maxwell Food Centre, which came to be our base. We decided to focus on white-collar workers as they made up the bulk of the clientele. We made use of many different methods like customer journey maps, affinity diagrams and value proposition maps to inform our experience design, and observed several key pain points. We also conducted an online survey and face-to-face interviews to find out about the eating habits and mobile payment usage among different demographics and unsurprisingly, students and full time workers are most likely to use a form of internet banking and mobile payment applications such as DBS Paylah!

We made use of affinity clustering to group and categorize our research findings. Many interviewees also cited the quintessentially Singaporean tradition of “chopeing” seats as a pain point and an eyesore, and this was one of the opportunity areas we decided to zoom in on. Some of the key pain points and opportunity areas were as follows; chopeing of seats (and by extension being able to find a free seat when you are carrying your food back to the table), not knowing how crowded a hawker centre is until you reach there, and of course a hatred of queueing.

Our solution is a mobile application that is an e-ordering system, queuing and chopeing system all in one. We used Marvel app to scan in my low fidelity drawings of the app and convert it into a clickable prototype for preliminary user testing, and then did the rest in Adobe XD. The hawker stall owner side of the interface would be a tablet-style interface, modelled after the current food delivery/pickup apps like Deliveroo for ease of adoption.