Ask Friends
Ask Friends is an exclusive restaurant and nightlife discovery app designed to make dining out more personal and social. Instead of relying on generic reviews, users can discover new places recommended by their friends. The app also enables sharing restaurant details, landmarks, and personal favorites to create a trusted dining guide. With customizable preferences for cuisine type, location, pricing, and ambiance, Ask Friends delivers a personalized restaurant search experience that blends social networking with lifestyle convenience.
Country
United States of America
Service
Mobile App Development
Industry
Social Networking
Build your idea
About
The Project
Ask Friends is a social restaurant discovery app that empowers users to explore new restaurants and nightlife spots based on recommendations from friends. Designed for food lovers who trust personal referrals over generic reviews, the app allows users to share restaurant details, landmarks, and favorite dishes while customizing their preferences for cuisine type, location, price, and ambiance.
To ensure an engaging experience, QSS conducted feasibility studies, user research, and product discovery workshops to define the app’s core features, including one-tap social login, interactive maps, rating and review systems, table reservations, and wish lists. The team also analyzed competitors to incorporate market-leading enhancements, resulting in a cross-platform React Native app with seamless UI, push notifications, social feeds, and personalized dining suggestions that connect friends and food enthusiasts in real time.
Process We Followed
After lining up salient details related to the project, our team outlined a course of action that would be followed to develop a comprehensive solution. The process comprised of identification of problems, considering the relevant factors of the solution, taking note of common challenges faced, technology stack to be used and coming up with the outcome in the end.
1. Problem Identification
Ask Friends is a social dining app that helps users discover restaurants and nightlife through trusted friend recommendations, with filters for distance, price, rating, quick suggestions, and easy friend connections.
3. Solution Implementation
We conducted user research and a product discovery workshop to understand target needs, map features, and address technical challenges, while competitor analysis helped us identify gaps and craft a market-leading restaurant recommendation app.
2. Feasibility Study
Feasibility study confirmed the app’s potential, enabling direct calls, smart search, social media sync for friend recommendations, easy access to search history, and one-click table reservations for a seamless dining experience.
4. Challenges Faced by QSS
The team faced challenges integrating smooth UI/UX, one-tap social login, interactive maps, ratings & reviews, categorized menus, bookmarks, and real-time friend recommendations for a seamless restaurant-finding experience.
5. Final Outcome Achieved
QSS delivered a feature-rich, cross-platform restaurant finder app with seamless GUI, push notifications, interactive maps, booking status, wishlists, and social feed, enabling users to get trusted friend recommendations effortlessly.
Problem Identification
Apart from many other delightful bits and pieces, the one thing that still connects the people, irrespective of their cultures, is food. And restaurants are often the place to go and explore for food lovers. Most of the hearty eaters prefer to seek recommendation from a friend instead of taking stranger’s suggestions on trust. Therefore, we aim to develop a trustful restaurant and nightlife recommendation app that lets you ask your friends and help you explore new places.
- Filter search based on distance, price, rating and popularity
- Send and receive recommendations quickly
- This or That’ feature for a better suggestion of places
- Add friends in contact list effortlessly
Feasibility Study
After getting a clear head on making an app that would be contingent to friend's recommendation, we did a feasibility study to put the development process in order and evaluate the necessary steps to bring an idea into fruition. With the help of this study, we determined if the idea is collectively feasible and thus aimed at incorporating a restaurant finder app that would be appealing to users and help the client in achieving financial goals.
- Feature to call the restaurant directly
- Special search feature on the home screen
- Sync friends profile from social media for more recommendations
- Facile accessibility of search history
- One-click table reservation
Solution Implementation
Before diving into development, QSS conducted detailed planning sessions to define the app’s vision, scope, and roadmap. This ensured alignment with client goals, identified potential challenges early, and laid the foundation for a user-centric, feature-rich solution.
User research
It is vital to carry out user research activity fairly frequently before putting any of the solutions into development. This helps developers to understand the viewpoint of the target audience which furthermore helps in creating a truly great product.
Product discovery workshop
Product discovery workshop, as the name suggests, is the session that helps the product development team to gain an insight into the solution. It also serves as a roadmap for delivering the project, identifying cross-team dependencies and providing a plan to steer the project in the right direction. Through this workshop, the team of professionals developed a visualization towards the product which will help them in managing the project in a more structured way.
During the workshop, the participants learned more about the pragmatic personas and story mapping. This contributed to the idea of applying agile product discovery practices to a greater extent. Our team of developers and designers comprehensively evaluated the technical requirements of the project and addressed common problems that they could hit on during the development process and explained to clients what they have planned to surmount such barriers.
Competitor Analysis
A constant competitive analysis ensures the place of a brand in a market. We conducted thorough business research and probed that there are already many apps in the market which operates on friend’s recommendation and are backed with impressive key features. Consequently, we listed the improvisations that could be made and paid attention to crafting a market-dominant app.
Challenges Faced by Team QSS
In the midst of planning and crafting an application, the team of professional app developers faced a tough time integrating great UI/ UX and formulating a unique section of table reservation. Here we have mentioned a few of the major challenges -
- Devise one-tap social login
- Built-in interactive map
- Implement rating and review section
- Formulate interactive menu with categories
- Incorporate features to bookmark favorite restaurants and dishes
- Get instant dining recommendations from friends, family, and trusted sources
Final Outcome
With the goal of making an app idea tangible, our well-versed app development team, along with the designers and testers, went an extra mile and ultimately incorporated a top-notch restaurant finder app that enables users to seek the recommendation of friends. The team of proficient developers implemented a cross-platform app via React's declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript.
- Seamless integration of GUI
- In-app push notifications for any new recommendation
- Enable users to check the booking status of the restaurant
- Interactive map with a mark of location
- Allow users to wish list the restaurants and places
- Integrated social feed
Our Ask Friends app boosted user engagement by 52% with instant restaurant recommendations and seamless bookings, creating a trusted social dining experience. Elevate your food & nightlife solutions with QSS!
Sample Interview Questions
There are already many apps in the market which operates on friend’s recommendation and are backed with impressive key features. Consequently, we listed the improvisations that could be made and paid attention to crafting a market-dominant app.
- Filter search based on distance, price, rating and popularity
- Send and receive recommendations quickly
- This or That’ feature for a better suggestion of places
- Add friends in contact list effortlessly
Yes, we do have wireframe available however we need support from QSS designers to prepare a robust design for the app.
- Seamless integration of GUI
- In-app push notifications for any new recommendation
- Enable users to check the booking status of the restaurant
- Interactive map with a mark of location
- Allow users to wish list the restaurants and places
- Integrated social feed
We have used AWS cloud service.
The team of proficient developers implemented a cross-platform app via React's declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript.
Technology Stack
Android
Git
What Our client has to say!
" Highly recommended. I chose QSS based on their past work and I am glad that I did. It turned out as one of the best decisions of my life. The team designed my app and curated it as exactly as I wanted it to be. "
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