Description
EatTime is both and Android and Toq application that aims to streamline the process of interacting with restaurants as a large group, making the dining experience more enjoyable for all parties involved. On the Android side, the user can pick a place and time and send invites to their friends, while the user's Toq watch functions as a restaurant buzzer and interface for requesting services from the waitstaff.
Brainstorming Process
In our first brainstorming sessions, we touched upon restaurant-centered ideas, such as an app that tracked what place you were in a line, a check splitter, and the equivalent of the music service Pandora, except for restaurant selection. None of these ideas seemed particularly compelling, and some of these ideas did not have much of a reason to use the Toq watch.
The following are the list of ideas that are eventually integrated into our final app:
1) A restaurant reservation app - became a core feature. We wanted a core reservation feature that also allowed you to invite friends.
2) The in-dining restaurant experience that allowed a more personalized and personal interaction between waiters and the restaurant diners.
We eventually decided to take a step back and look at the restaurant experience as a whole- from selecting the venue and making the reservation, to the experience of being at the restaurant itself. Our main inspirations from our brainstorming session were the idea of using the Toq watch as a restaurant buzzer and the idea that the app could leverage the Google Location to do automatic check-in. This way, the user could save the time and effort of interacting with the receptionist before he or she started eating.
Our first prototype of EatTime was designed with the intention of being easy-to-use and unique. After discussing with the staff and reading our critiques from the first in-lecture demonstration, we decided to change the color from orange to red, for a more eye-catching effect, as well as include high-quality graphics, to improve the user experience. We also later designed a logo- a Pacman-like character eating a hamburger, for a cute and personal touch. The logo’s circular shape and mouth are also reminiscent of a clock, hence “EatTime”.
Competitive Analysis
For our app, there were three possible competitors that we found:
1) Yellow Pages
Although yellow pages carries a lot of information, they have an outdated "experience" and is not very feasible/accessible to people to find restaurants or do any of the organizations requirements that our app features.
2) Yelp
Yelp is better than yellow pages because it provides context awareness of selections of restaurants so that people don't have to look for them. This allows people to look for restaurants and search for the ones they want and have high approvals. However, this app does not do reservations and it does not allow personalization of the dining experience. Our app is different because it will allow us to make reservations, send invite to friends, and handle all the organization details for our clients.
3) OpenTable
Open Table is our closest competitor, however, it lacks two core features:as
- The ability to invite friends and share your reservations with other people.
- It does not allow personal waiter/diner interaction or facilitate that interaction. Our app does that by giving a simple options menu to allow diners to order, bill pay, and provides basic waiter information for diners to feel they are more unique and personable with the waiter.Type in a caption
Personas
The target user group for our project is restaurant goers that regularly make or are invited to reservations. This group includes everyone from friends casually dining to event organizers. For this reason we developed two personas: one that casually dines with friends and another that organizes events.
Our casual dining persona is Melissa. Melissa is a 25 year old legal secretary from San Francisco. She lives with two other young professionals in a lively part of town. After work she likes to go to the gym then meet up with friends for food and drinks. She graduated from CSU San Francisco with a degree in criminal justice. Her ultimate goal is go to law school and become a lawyer. She loves using EatTime because she can easily make plans with her friends after dinner and never has to worry about checking in or wondering where her friends are. She just waits at the bar till her watch buzzes to let her know her table is ready!
Our event organizer persona is Rick. Rick is a 35 year old father of two: a twelve year old boy and an eleven year old girl. Rick is an architect and a devoted father. He lives in a house with his wife and children. He graduated from USC. His ultimate goal is to become a partner in his architectural firm and be the best dad he can be. He uses EatTime for work dinners and pizza parties as well as reservations with his wife and/or friends.
scenarios
For the first scenario, a user makes a reservation and manage it using Eat Time. Most existing tools as well as our app have a “Make reservation” button on the main page. Users are able to start the reservation process by clicking on this button. In our app, a calendar and a time picker are used to select time, in addition to a textbox where users enter their size of the party. On each page there is a “next step” button for users to proceed, and a “back” button to revert the options selected. There is no extra knowledge needed to finish the process. This task is rated as moderate because it involves multiple steps, but each step is straightforward.
This scenario documents the first task that the user will have to perform upon obtaining the app. They will have to go from the profile screen, where there is an existing reservation list. They will also be able to cancel a reservation and see detailed information about the reservation once the reservation is made.
For the second scenario, a user invites his friends to the party through messages. Most existing tools do not have “invite friends” function. The invitor has to inform the invitees individually by phone, text messaging, Facebook, or Google Calendar. And a message consisting of the restaurant information, date and time needs to be manually composed. This tasks is rated as moderate as it unavoidably takes a long time and effort. With our app, the person who made the reservation can one click send text messages or Eat Time messages to all invitees once their phone numbers are stored or their Eat Time account is added. And there is no extra work required to compose the message since our app will put in the message all the detailed information including time, restaurant information, invitor’s name, and optionally everyone else’s name who are also going. This task is less difficult with our app compared to with existing tools and applications.
In this scenario, the user performs a critical and very straightforward action in our application: informing friends about this party. Eat Time provides a one click invite function to users on the reservation page, after they have selected all the friends that they choose to invite. Moreover, if the invitee has Eat Time installed on his phone and the Toq Watch, he will receive a notification on the Watch when he’ invited for a meal.
The third scenario is checking in for tables. Checking in for tables is hard using existing tools such as buzzers. A user has to take the buzzer and wait for the reserved table to be available. Extra costs such as buying the buzzers and manage them is required for the restaruant. With our app, there is no buzzer needed. A notification will be pushed onto the Toq Watch once the table becomes available. A User does’t need to keep an eye on the buzzer and bear its loud noise when it does off. This task is very easy to perform with our app - all that a user needs is to wear the watch.
User Studies
For research we conducted interviews of restaurant owners and contextual inquiry on restaurant goers. We received much different feedback from these two groups because of the differences in the interface on both sides. Both the interviews and the contextual inquiry provided us with information that more or less supported the advantages of our idea.
Restaurant owners were much more hesitant to let us interview them. Many of them did not even allow us to interview their wait staff. They did not seem to like that they would need to buy watches for their wait staff and manage yet another database. They did, however, appreciate the automatic check in idea as well as the watch being used as a buzzer.
Restaurant goers were much more excited about the idea. Many of them expressed a distaste for the buzzers. For instance, twenty two year old Noretta said, “Yeah. It’s about 50/50 between useful and annoying. It’s ok. but a little annoying- I’m sensitive to noise, so I find the vibrating on the table to be loud.” Many of them also told us that they had a very hard time coordinating reservations with groups of more than six people. twenty five year old Jen said, “It’s so annoying. I hate when I show up first, but I don’t know so I call to see if I should check in and the line gets longer, or I’ll wait to check in and someone else already has.” Jen uses many apps to organize as well. She uses OpenTable to make reservations then FindMyFriends to track her party as well as group texting. “It’s obnoxious,” she said.
From this research we have found that restaurant goers would very much appreciate the functionality of our app. Restaurant owners also appreciate certain features, but are hesitant about buying new hardware.
Here's the list of questions we asked and some replies:
Questions
1. How do you normally make a reservation for a restaurant?
2. Have you ever had to wait in a long line to check in for a reservation?
3. Have you ever been given a buzzer to alert you when your table is ready?
3.1 If yes, can you describe your experience with this buzzer?
4. When was the last time you went to a restaurant with a group of people?
5. Can you describe your experience coordinating with the other members of your party?
6. Have you ever had difficulty splitting the bill?
Mark, 25
Call them.
No, I wouldn’t say so.
Yes. They’re just buzzers, they vibrate and light up.
Saturday.
There 6-7 people. But we were already in a group together, so it wasn’t too bad.
Yes, but not often anymore since we have Venmo. When there’s 8+ people it becomes really hard to split it evenly, because half the people pay with card, half with cash, and it becomes a huge hassle.
Narottana, 57.
I’ve never made one.
No.
Yeah. It’s about 50/50 between useful and annoying. It’s ok. but a little annoying- I’m sensitive to noise, so I find the vibrating on the table to be loud.
I do mostly everything alone these days. I don’t remember.
I don’t remember.
Hmm, that’s true. People get touchy about the bill. It’s a joy when people are ordering, but it’s funny how people tense up when the bill comes.
Technical Challenges and Notes
One of the challenge we face during the implementation process is to send invitations to friends through either internet or text messaging system while keeping their personal information safe. When sending information to a specific device, a user might not want his login credentials as well as his history being stored on the receiving device. We also want to take care of duplication in username and invitation. We started out using Google Cloud Messaging system, but we ran into a problem of creating a third party application server. We then made a technology decision to change our system from Google Cloud Messaging into FireBase. With nested json database as well as full integration with Android App. We built a secured login and authentication system to protect user’s personal information. Invitations are stored using timestamp as key to avoid duplication and support chronological order sorting.
Our application interface requires information transfer from one activity to another as well as to the server then come back to the device. In order to divide the code work and parallelize our development process, we made adapters for each of the our data models so that no members have to wait on any other members’ work to finish. This allows us to speed up our development by making progress in all part of the application at the same time. This also allows us to practice agile project management and create an fast-paced, energetic and helpful working environment.
Another challenge is to send notification to users on the Toq smartwatch in real time while keeping our java code clean from flooded data searches and stores in every activities, which might result in inconsistent notification on the smartwatch. We define a user model and a restaurant model. The two models communicate using invitation instances throughout the app as well as to the database. By hooking up asynchronous listeners for data change in the database inside Profile Activity and saving these data using shared preferences, we manage to keep the code clean as well as be able to reliably send notifications to the watch in real time.
During the implementation process, we ran into the problem with members in our group using different version of Android Studio. Our code starts out on version 0.8, once imported into version 1.0, it is unable to compile our Eat Time project. We have to revert to earlier commit and downgrade all Android Studio to version 0.8 before being able to move on.
Initial Designs and Initial WireFrames
We didn't have a select restaurants option because we initially only wanted to do a single restaurant only, but we decided to change it to have restaurants become affiliated with us.
When thinking about the types of actions a user would want to take with Eat Time, we came up with four representative tasks. A user would want to make reservations for a restaurant, he would want to send a message to all the friends that he invited, and he would want to automatic check in and call a waiter at the restaurant.
Final Designs and WireFrames
Code shared on Bitbucket with usernames: Trung Ha (eriflame), Ashley Gau (agau4779), Dylan McCapes (dmccapes), ngoctranfire, sjyu1414
In Summary
Our mission with the Eat Time app is to provide restaurant goers with personal, efficient, non-intrusive and comfortable dining experiences. Before the meal, our app provides party invitors with a quick and easy way to make reservations and inform their friends. By using our app, invitees receive notifications on their Toq Watches and will be informed about all the party details. Upon arriving at the restaurant, users benefit from automatic check in based on their locations. During the meal, users communicate with the waiters/waitresses using Eat Time Toq App without any disturbance to their dining experience and other people in the restaurant.
In Eat Time, we focused on allowing users to have fast and reliable communication with their friends and the restaurant. With a press of a button, they are connected with their friends and the waiters/waitress who are also important roles in the dining. We integrate event planning, reservations, and contacting people into one app. Our easy-to-use, intuitive UI allows new users to get accustomed to our App very quickly and rely on it for all their following organizations for parties. Going out with friends has never been easier with Eat Time!
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