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Project Overview
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Hungry? We aim to help you discover food nearby, fast.
Our data rich app, allows you to browse restaurant menus, see reviews and order online. We currently have 95% coverage of Geelong restaurant menus and will maintain this high coverage as we expand into other cities in the future.
Customers order online for convenience and to save time. We place a heavy emphasis on making the ordering experience smooth and fast. Want to re-order the pizza you had last Friday night? You can do that in less than 3 seconds with our app.
Organisation
Team
We are a small, innovative, self-funded startup. Our team consists of Adam (designer/founder), George (Backend/API developer) and Paul (iOS developer).
Our team has a high regard for well designed and user-friendly apps. We have examined hundreds of other iPhone apps to assess their usability and design. We strive to implement industry best practices, in terms of design and usability.
Being a small team allows us to change rapidly and meet the dynamic needs of our users.
Project Brief
Motivated by the need to create an app that we personally would like to use ourselves, we set out to build a product that was ad-free, extremely fast, useful, and a pleasure to use. Our aim was to build a polished, feature rich app that would encourage frequent usage.
Our app gets straight to the point, there is no splash screens or buttons to click; instead we take you directly to a list of restaurants nearby your current location.
The app provides users with all the relevant information needed when making a decision to dine out or order take away. We provide restaurant menus, photos, and reviews. The primary features of the MenuHub app are:
• Ability to browse every restaurant menu in a standardised format (filter by gf/veg)
• Online ordering (pay online with PayPal or credit card)
• Re-order in less than 3 seconds!
• Loyalty program (for coffee)
MenuHub currently covers restaurants in the Geelong region. We have the intention to expand to other cities in the future.
Project Need
The way we process menus is one of our most significant innovations. Rather than link to the restaurants website menu, which can often be difficult to read on a mobile device, we collect and key in each menu item into our system. Once the data is in a structured format it allows us to display the menu in a much nicer format, along with the ability to filter by vegetarian and gluten free menu items etc.
Further to this, we allow the user to order online from selected restaurants. This includes anything from coffee to pizza. The app also has a built in coffee loyalty card program, allowing you to lighten your wallet.
People are creatures of habit, often ordering the same thing from the same store. To increase user engagement and app usage, we were determined to make the reordering process as fast as possible. Our app offers customers the ability to reorder in less than 3 seconds! The app will remember all your preferences (for example, 1 sugar with soy milk). When the customer picks up their coffee there is no loyalty card to stamp or cash to hand over, its all been done seamlessly ahead of time.
No detail is too small; I personally like to use Google maps for directions over Apple maps. Our app intelligently detects if you have Google maps installed and gives you the choice of maps to use when getting directions to a restaurant.
User Experience
As we know, mobile phones have limited screen real estate. It’s common for user to get lost and overwhelmed with many screens.
Others have attempted to solve this by using blur and semi-transparent backgrounds to give a feel of depth. Our team has taken this one step further by simply reducing the number of screens. We have only two primary screens, the restaurant list and details page. The user is able to apply filters from the restaurant list screen without ever leaving the page.
Further, we only show information that is relevant to the user. For example, if the user selects the vegetarian filter, then we show vegetarian specific information for each restaurant. Taking this approach removes unnecessary clutter for non-vegetarian users.
To reduce the friction and time needed for a user to learn how our app works, we use familiar iOS components. Further to this, we aim to re-use as many of our own components as possible. You will notice the restaurant summary row used on the list view is re-used on the map view. We strive to adhere to Apples iOS Human Interface Guidelines.
No one likes a slow app. We have invested heavily in our apps performance. Our native built app powered by our own API provides the best performance possible. It doesn’t stop there; Our API is powered by Elasticsearch, a powerful search engine used by companies such as Yelp and Foursquare.
Project Marketing
Since our company is in the early stages, our marketing has been limited to date.
Though, we have found word of mouth to be a very effective marketing strategy. Social networks such as Facebook have further enhanced the effectiveness of word of mouth, allowing a message to be shared among many friends very quickly.
We are very focused on building an A grade product that people will naturally want to tell others about. We will do a bit of shouting ourselves to build the awareness of the app initially, though we believe our product will speak for itself in the long run.
Like us on Facebook :)
Project Privacy
MenuHub has an extensive privacy policy that is viewable on our website. http://www.menuhub.com.au/privacy-policy
Best Mobile or App Startup
This category relates to Startups working on a Mobile project or an App. The project could be for smartphones, tablet, web, game console or api apps. Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.
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