Eat here or there will be an app that will provide its user’s the ability to choose the best restaurant nearest them. “Best” restaurant is subjective but the criteria we chose to find or search a restaurant is universal. When someone wants to go out and eat at nice a restaurant for an occasion or just for a casual walk in lunch or dinner, there is one thing they all want - Not be disappointed! In order to give the users’ the best results we not only query restaurant’s according to their user given ratings but also combine the user’s rating along with NYC letter grades and description of violations if any.
We wanted to design something that is “reliable” and also more importantly, “authentic”. That is why we combine the user given reviews, ratings and the NYC letter grades. User reviews are most of the times reliable but they may not be always be authentic. On the other hands NYC letter grades and violations are given NYC health department. Every restaurant goes through an sanitary inspection each year. As a result NYC restaurant letters are authentic and trustable.
The grades range is A,B or C. If no grade is assigned to a restaurant the restaurant is assigned a “P”. “P” means grade is pending. If a restaurant receives a grade however for some reason doesn’t post it on the outside then the restaurant receives a critical violation which is posted online. So our application will make know what other people thought of the restaurant as well as how hygienic the restaurant is. We are offering reliability along with authenticity.
Searching for a restaurant nearby is one of key things of our application. Another key feature we will bring with this app is “finding” a new restaurant according to user’s history. User’s history will have user’s past searches and if the user visited restaurants than those restaurant will have the user’s ratings. We will weigh user’s searches and user’s visited restaurants differently. By giving both searches and user’s visited restaurant a rating’s a weight, we will design an algorithm that will learn user’s data. This step will find new restaurants which the user never visited but would love to visit.
Our front-end end will be native applications for iOS and possibly Android if sufficient time is there. The basic design of the UI will consists of tabs at the bottom for view selection between searching, finding and user account management. Information will be collected via text input boxes and displayed in table list format. Each item will show the icon of a Yelp profile, business name, Yelp review grade, letter grade, and a flag to alert users if there is something critically wrong with the restaurant. From there the user can select an item for more detailed explanation of the NYC letter grade and view Yelp profile.
The back-end will be running using a cloud-based service called Firebase. Firebase is an real-time non-relational database. We chose to opt for a cloud-based service due to the scalability and non-existent maintenance. Large companies use cloud-based services as they don’t have to manage servers and have the worry of scaling as all of this is done automatically. API access is available for iOS, Android and other platforms. This lets us take time that would have been spent on database management and design and spend it on UI aspects. Ultimately, the combination of native apps and cloud-based back-end will result in our final product to be extremely user-friendly.