1. Concept & Intentions

DineMe is a social dining platform built around a simple, playful mechanic: users create dinner appointments and invite others to join them, or browse and request to be invited to someone else’s — sharing food and experiences along the way, whether that means treating or being treated. The goal was to design this exchange so it felt fun and low-friction, turning food into the icebreaker for meeting new people rather than relying on a traditional matching mechanic.

2. Research & Approach

We structured the discovery and design process around the Double Diamond framework, moving from an open problem space to a validated, testable product.

// Discover: we ran a competitive analysis spanning two categories — dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge) and restaurant-discovery platforms (TheFork, TripAdvisor, Google Maps) — to understand where DineMe’s invite-and-join model sat between the two. This was paired with semi-structured user interviews, conducted independently, exploring how people decide whether to host or join a dinner with someone they don’t know yet.

// Define: Synthesizing the research surfaced a few key insights: people evaluate the host or guest behind an invite before deciding whether to join; the “treating/being treated” dynamic needed to feel transparent and unpressured rather than transactional; and numerical ratings felt reductive for judging a shared social experience. These became the design considerations woven into the core invite-and-join flows.

// Develop: based on these insights, we defined the information architecture and mapped five core user flows together with the design team — onboarding, navigation, invite discovery, invite creation, and profile.

// Deliver: we built wireframes for the key screens within each flow together with the design team (sign-up, profile setup, reporting, invite creation) as a testable prototype.