Lactoseless

Lactoseless is the product of MCAD’s eight week User Experience Design Systems and Prototyping Concepts course. Throughout this course, we focused on learning about and building a design system, prototyping, and user testing.

At the end of January 2020 we found out my husband is lactose intolerant. Throughout February we didn’t go out to eat because it was overwhelming.  Instead, we stayed home and learned to cook without dairy. Then March of 2020 happened, and the world shut down, and for the rest of the year we got takeout from places we knew we could just avoid dairy all together. 2020 was the year of Pad Thai in our household. 

February 2021 we went out to eat at a restaurant for the first time since my husband went dairy free and the world shut down. It took me HOURS to figure out where to go. Suddenly, as friends started wanting to grab brunch, or dinner, I realized we needed to find a way to quickly find restaurants my husband could eat at. So when our instructor said “Design an app that solves a problem” I had an immediate idea. 

The downside of being dairy free is not many establishments note that on their menu. The upside is there is a growing number of restaurants who note their vegan offerings, which means they are safe for a dairy allergy. Just to get a feel of things, I looked at how different restuarants around the Twin Cities noted vegan items on their menu.

Foxy Falafel has a key to show you that a “VG” stands for vegan items on their menu, while a “V” is vegetarian.

Pizza Luce calls their vegan items out in the item description, and often titling them “Mock”. But what I really loved about Pizza Luce, is they actually have a button in the top right that helps you easily filter out non-vegan items, and see a list of only what’s vegan.

Red Cow however just calls out the vegan menu item, as well as the vegan ingredients on their menu.

Now the problem remains that finding these restaurants is hard. It’s incredibly tedious to sift through every single restaurant that comes up from a quick google search, and search every establishments menu. The goal of lactoseless was to make it easy to find out what restaurants near you have dairy free offerings, and easily check out what they are.

Through various rounds of user testing, improvements were made to layout, structure, type size, colors, addition and prominence of buttons, the removal of the ever present navigation bar, and the addition of the location services. There were also