Duration: 3 weeks (July 2020)
Role: Co-Lead User Researcher and UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Deliverable: Redesign menus, brand logo, business cards

Objective

With the onset of COVID-19 forcing local restaurants to close their doors, Pho Huong decided to utilize this hiatus as a chance to revitalize their brand identity.

The essence of this mom-and-pop restaurant revolves around their passion for Vietnamese cuisine and the desire to share that love with their customers. The owners of Pho Huong, realized their brand aesthetic was outdated and sought to collaborate with my team and me on re-evaluating the purpose and values behind their brand.

This project resulted in a visual redesign of their restaurant menus, brand logo, and business cards.

Current Menu and Business Card:

Research

Hoping to learn more about customer frustrations, we conducted 3 customer interviews and 1 stakeholder interview to gather feedback on the current menu and logo. Here are some key insights from our user interviews:

Having never designed a menu before, we decided to conduct secondary research to better understand the principles and consumer psychology behind menu design. Making conscious design choices like product placement and currency sign removal are tactics that encourage consumers to spend more.

Logo

Pho Huong’s current logo utilized the same Ben Thanh Market design for the past 10 years and it was beginning to feel antiquated. They were ready for a change, but wanted something simple and timeless. The objective was to attract a younger demographic in order to reach a wider range of customers, allowing the restaurant owners to share their culinary passion with all.

Through a collaborative process, we combined the owner’s passion for cooking and their main dish of Pho, Vietnamese beef noodle soup, into a recognizable, contemporary logo.

Menu

Synthesizing stakeholder and customer feedback, we began our menu redesign by consolidating the current 5 page, 90-item menu into a 2 page, 24-item menu. Thuy, the head chef, mentioned that a plethora of dishes were less popular and customers felt overwhelmed by the vast amount of available dishes to choose from. Our goal was to highlight the chef’s most popular and profitable dishes while making the consumer experience of choosing what to eat as seamless and effortless as possible.

Combining a beige color scheme with a sans-serif font, the new menu incorporates a relaxing and contemporary aesthetic to represent the ambiance of Pho Huong’s restaurant.

Style Guide:

Focusing on product placement, we strategically placed pho dishes in the top right section of the menu. Following the principle of the Golden Triangle, customers tend to pay most attention to the top right and left corners of a menu. We surrounded the pho dishes with a stylized border to highlight the chef’s speciality in Vietnamese beef noodle soups.

The previous menu had some translation errors so we overhauled the english translations, allowing customers who did not speak Vietnamese to better visualize the contents of the dishes.

Business Card

With a new style guide in place, we modernized the business card by removing unnecessary content and revamping the visuals.

 Reflection

This project was a great opportunity for me to give back to my community and assist a local business impacted by COVID-19. Applying the design process to work on the rebranding of this business was super fun and rewarding.