Rondavu

A patent-pending AI-powered collaboration platform designed to reduce group decision fatigue and support healthier, more inclusive dining choices by blending human preferences with intelligent recommendations — all within the familiar flow of group messaging.

In this project, I led the end-to-end UX strategy, research, and design, shaping a human-centric system that balances individual dietary goals, social dynamics, and real-world constraints. Through behavioral research, decision modeling, and prototype validation, I crafted an experience that makes shared decisions easier, more equitable, and aligned with how people actually interact with one another and with AI.

Tools Used: Sketching, Maze, Figma, FigJam, Canva, ChatGPT



Team Size - 3

2023 - Present

Startup

Role - UX Lead

What is the problem?

Market analysis helped clarify the problem space within the food industry by highlighting shifts in consumer preferences, dining behaviors, and health expectations. It surfaced the underlying needs and tensions influencing how people decide where and what to eat, as well as the cultural, economic, and regional factors shaping those choices. These insights made it possible to identify where existing menus and service models no longer aligned with evolving habits, and to frame the problem around adapting experiences to changing food culture and health-conscious behaviors.

What are the goals?

First step was to understand the premise of the product's vision. It started off by one of Rondavu's founders having a whiteboarding session when planning lunch with colleagues, and an idea was born. Our team got together to brainstorm the goals of the project and measures of success of the project.

Goal

Motivate people to keep track of their diet and healthy choices when going out to eat.

Measure

Test features that integrate health applications with Rondavu to help users track their diet progress and lifestyle when going out to eat.

Goal

Make decisions easier when going out to eat with a group of friends, colleagues, or family while tracking one's healthy habits when out. Providing search engines for groups with different preferences and lifestyles to provide the most compatible options.

Measure

Do groups feel like their decision-making has been made easier when going out to eat? Do they get the right recommendations based on what is up and coming and what fits their needs? Does each group member feel like they've been heard? Does each member feel like they are offered the best experience for their preferences, but also the preferences of the whole group? In order to measure this, we participated in a series of group outings and interviewed groups of people on how they manage decision-making when they go out to eat with friends, family, or colleagues.



What are the common lifestyle habits?

Following goal analysis, we mapped behavioral patterns around group eating to understand how health goals intersect with social dynamics and real-world constraints. This synthesis revealed where users abandon healthy intentions—not due to lack of motivation, but due to social friction—guiding us toward designs that support behavior change without guilt or rigidity.

How do people make decisions?

To design how Rondavu generates recommendations, I created a decision mind map that made the complexity of group dining explicit. The framework translated diverse inputs—dietary needs, health goals, budget, cultural authenticity, sustainability, social dynamics, and logistics—into a structured decision model. By separating inputs, resolution logic, and outputs, it clarified how individual preferences, group values, and real-world constraints interact within a single flow. This approach surfaced key edge cases early and guided when to use deterministic rules versus AI-assisted reasoning, enabling explainable recommendations that reduce decision fatigue and clearly reflect group priorities.

Who is the target audience?

I explored multiple user personas to understand how group dynamics impact decision-making when eating out. From the health-conscious friend to the budget-restricted diner to the indecisive planner, each persona brought unique challenges — especially when navigating diverse preferences, dietary needs, and time constraints. By mapping their pain points, I identified common friction zones and designed solutions that ease coordination and reduce the mental load of group dining.

What are the user scenarios and possible solutions?

Before defining specific scenarios and solutions, we facilitated a collaborative How Might We workshop to translate user research insights into actionable design opportunities. The goal was to reframe complex behavioral, social, and logistical challenges into clear problem statements the team could align around. Together, we explored four core dimensions of the group dining experience—restaurant selection, personalized experience among groups, comparison of choices, and social experience—to identify where friction, negotiation, and decision fatigue most commonly occur. This exercise helped the team move from isolated pain points to a shared understanding of the broader system, ensuring that subsequent concepts addressed root problems rather than surface symptoms. The outputs of this workshop informed the scenarios, feature exploration, and solution concepts that followed.

To anchor Rondavu in real-world decision-making, we collaboratively mapped high-frequency user stories that capture the most common group dining scenarios. This exercise helped us define the product context, uncover core pain points, and ideate solution patterns that support healthier choices without disrupting social dynamics.


Keeping Up With Diet

For users with health or weight-related goals, eating out is less about food selection and more about navigating competing pressures—personal intentions, social expectations, and decision fatigue. To unpack this complexity, we identified the core behavioral, cognitive, social, and psychological mechanisms that shape how people make group dining decisions.

Going Out To Eat With Friends

Going out to eat can be tough when scheduling a get-together with a group of people who have their preferences. Rondavu's AI functionality can recommend options within the messaging tool based on what is available according to everyone's preferred settings on the app.

Rondavu embeds AI-powered recommendations directly into the group’s messaging flow, allowing everyone to participate in the decision without leaving the conversation. By factoring in individual preferences, dietary needs, and real-time availability, the system surfaces options that are most likely to reach group consensus—fast.

Value Proposition

This value proposition workshop synthesized user research, behavioral insights, and business considerations into a clear, shared understanding of Rondavu’s purpose and differentiation. By mapping user pain points—such as decision fatigue, social pressure, and conflicting preferences—against user and business value, the exercise clarified how Rondavu’s conversational AI mediates group consensus rather than simply generating recommendations. The outcome aligned stakeholders around a group-first decision model that reduces friction, supports healthier and more inclusive choices, and naturally fits into existing social conversations. This framework not only articulated a compelling user promise but also established a scalable foundation for growth, partnerships, and future feature prioritization.

How do we differentiate from competitors?

The goal of the competitive analysis was to understand how existing platforms support (or fail to support) group-based decision-making around dining and social planning. We evaluated leading apps to identify where they excel in individual discovery—and where they break down when preferences, constraints, and coordination shift from individual to group contexts.

We analyzed each platform’s core features, strengths, and limitations through the lens of group coordination, speed to consensus, and contextual relevance. This allowed us to identify clear opportunity areas where Rondavu could differentiate by supporting shared decision-making rather than isolated search.

What is MVP?

After reviewing competitive gaps and feedback on existing solutions, the team facilitated an affinity-based prioritization workshop to align on feature scope. Features were evaluated and grouped based on user impact, urgency, and technical feasibility, resulting in a clear MVP cutoff and a shared roadmap for POC exploration.

Let's brainstorm!

Sketching and ideation played a crucial role in visualizing the core features of the app early in the design process. These quick, low-fidelity sketches helped translate abstract ideas into tangible layouts, making it easier to identify key user interactions and refine the app's structure. By iterating on paper, I could explore design options that gave me confidence when traslating to hi-fi mockups. The bigest piece was the messaging application and how voting was constructed along with AI functionality to list the options, and information about each place in review. It is still being refined and I keep coming back to pencil and paper throughout the process.

Vibe Coding

After initial sketching, we used rapid prototyping in Replit to explore and pressure-test interaction ideas through live AI-enabled chat flows. This approach helped us quickly evaluate feasibility, refine behaviors, and uncover new opportunities beyond static designs.

What is the user journey and experience flow?

After the user journey mapping, a messaging functionality and in-app experiences displayed in a user flow diagram was helpful in understanding the flow of the experience when users want to take actions. They start with the messaging app and talk about going out to eat. Rondavu icon in the tray menu can bring up AI search tool to suggest the best places to go to in accordance to everyone's preferences.They can view information, menu options, and discounts before ordering Uber to pick them up. They also get to vote on which option they prefer.

What is the story behind our brand?

We led a collaborative brand exploration to define Rondavu’s visual and verbal identity. Through iterative concepting, we aligned on logo direction, typography, color systems, aesthetic patterns, and brand voice—creating a flexible brand system that supports both social engagement and health-oriented decision-making.

  • Rondavu's story is nested in gathering, health, and fun. Rondavu's mission is to provide an easy and interactive fun way of seeing loved ones while out to eat and taking their food and entertainment preferences into account as well as their health in a collaborative way while staying on top of new developments in the food industry that would be a good choice for the group.

  • Rondavu's two main functionalities are to be able to schedule outings that are compatible with individual needs, while still in a group setting, and to monitor healthy eating while going out to eat.

  • Brand colors have been picked to represent a connection to nature and health. Both salmon and more subtle hues of green are the choices to communicate this.

  • Type font's purpose was to represent playfulness, fun, and diversity. The eccentricity of the font choice represents those.

  • The logo stands for three key ideas - health, gathering, and location. Rondavu does just that. It develops a solution to make gathering in a group easily manageable with the individual needs of participants when it comes to their food choices and health and finding the right places to check out that would be a good choice for everyone. The shape of the logo originates from the location icon, with layers of colors to represent layers of choices and preferences for places to eat, with a figure being excited or in good spirits.

  • Images are to be of social gatherings and a good time, or groups of people on the phone. They are to always project diversity and inclusion.

  • Pattern is to be used across designs using the brand colors and complimenting image choices.

What is our hi-fidelity design?

To balance speed and rigor, we used rapid sketching and Replit prototypes to explore interaction behavior early, then formalized validated concepts in Figma using a shared design system. This approach enabled fast iteration while ensuring consistency, scalability, and alignment with engineering from ideation through implementation.

How is the design scalable?

To support speed and scale, we built a component-driven design system in Figma with shared styles and tokens. This foundation enabled rapid assembly, visual consistency, and efficient cross-platform scaling while reducing design and engineering rework.

Does the target audience understand our product?

To assess real-world decision-making, we tested two high-impact experiences: personal preference setup and group voting within messaging. By pairing task-based testing with pre- and post-session questions, we captured behavioral patterns, decision friction, and opportunity areas to guide iteration and roadmap decisions.

What is our ongoing strategy?

Customer growth was approached in phases, starting with targeted partnerships and community-building to validate the concept, followed by scalable acquisition channels and strategic brand amplification. This phased approach allowed us to balance early traction with long-term sustainability.

The roadmap reflects a balance between foundational work and iterative delivery—sequencing brand strategy, research, design, testing, and feature expansion to support a thoughtful launch and continuous improvement post-release.

Rondavu was designed to evolve through continuous learning, iteration, and market validation. Our ongoing strategy aligns product growth, user needs, and operational execution—ensuring the platform can scale responsibly while remaining grounded in real-world behaviors and feedback.

To support investor outreach, I designed and produced an end-to-end product walkthrough video, a pitch deck, and a one-pager that translated the product experience, value proposition, and roadmap into clear, decision-ready narratives. The goal was to reduce ambiguity, align stakeholders, and help investors quickly understand both the user problem and the product’s strategic differentiation.

Impact

Key Takeaways

“It is a lot like dining out with a bunch of friends.

Where to go? Italian? Vegetarian? Steakhouse?

Each person has their own appetite, which can make creating a 'shared- interest' extremely challenging.”

"I would like to have the option to select invitees from a friends list, a list of possible restaurant options, available dates and times for a get-together, and send out. Friends would input their choices and rank them……the output would be a list of friends that would attend, a restaurant, time, and date."