Ask Friends

An exclusive restaurant finder solution that helps users to discover new restaurants and nightlife recommended by friends. The application also allows people to share information and landmarks of their preferred restaurants.

The users can also set their preferences for the type of food, places, prices and more.

Country US
Service Social Networking
Industry Multiple
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Process Followed

What separates a unique app from a regular one is its target audience. When it comes to developing an app for one of its kind users, it becomes important to pay special attention to every part of the process rather than glossing over. We at QSS, before putting the app into development, formed a proper strategy and held through it during the development process.

PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
FEASIBILITY STUDY
SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION
CHALLENGES
FINAL OUTCOME

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

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.

Sample interview questions

What is the potential market you can think of for this app?

How do you think this app is different from other restaurant finder apps in the market? What makes it market-dominant?

Do you have any framework in mind on which the app will be built upon or you want us to walk you through different frameworks?

Can you please list the necessary features you would like to include in the app?

Which cloud service would you prefer? - AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform

What technical aspects are you looking forward to implementing to make the app user-centric and highly versatile?

The Challenges

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 favourite 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 wishlist the restaurants and places
Integrated social feed

Information Architecture

Technology Stack

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.

Anonymous

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