Inspiration
This idea was conceived while traveling around Europe, and being frustrated with inaccurate Yelp and Google restaurant reviews. We wanted to rethink the idea of reviewing food from first principles, to design a product that improves UX for users who want to share their experience, and users who are looking for dinner ideas.
What it does
Dish-specific, hyper-local, recency-biased, photo-centric, and palette-aware reviews ecosystem. We've built a native app along with a landing page on the web.
How we built it
React native (for app interactivity and maps usage) + Firebase (for real-time updates of reviews in the app as they are submitted, and seamless storage of reviews data and user information)
Challenges we ran into
- Setting up the app development environment, especially on Windows
- Connecting components and working with maps in a native environment
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- End-to-end progression from idea on the bus to final product at 8am in the morning with a team of relatively inexperienced hackers
- Smooth division of labor and communication between design and engineering functions
- Successfully incorporated React Native and Firebase into Plattr, despite lack of team experience with app development (specifically with React Native)
What we learned
- App development is hard, especially on Windows
- UX tradeoffs are difficult to make with so little time to test on real users
What's next for Plattr
- Detailed review analytics
- Goal: to outline impact of each individual review to encourage user contributions
- Taste preference profile feature
- Goal: to enable weighting of reviews based on taste preference similarity between viewer and individual reviewers
- Goal: to enable development of recommender system to maximize review relevance
- UI improvements (e.g. ratings pop up when they are scrolled over)
Built With
- React Native
- Firebase