We find that the best way to get to know a new city, town, or area is through its food. While services offer one time recommendations, we, as tourists, often look for a path connecting our meals, coffee stops, and snacks in between.
Taking a "make your own adventure" vibe, the web app asks for users to input information regarding their food adventure. The center of adventure is the center point where we gauge how far destinations should be. The spiritual food guide is split into a hipster setting and a tourist setting. The hipster setting is for the adventurous, recommending less reviewed, but highly venues, while the tourist setting takes the most popular and most reviewed venues. The user can also choose which meals they want on their path. The "difficulty level" is an indication of how far a user is willing to travel from their center of adventure.
Some of the fields, such as the tour guide and difficulty level, are left to be slightly facetious and ambiguous to add a level of anticipation and mystery to their food adventure.
The backend of the web app is in PHP and Javascript, which first processes the Yelp API call to retrieve venues and then displayed on Google Maps via their API. The front-end of the site is built with Bootstrap.js and designed responsively for mobile and web. p
_ Front-end_ One of the main issues that we encountered was compatibility between devices and browser, where buttons would show up for Android and Windows, while unable to be viewed on iOS. Learning the HTML5 documentation, especially with localStorage, was new to us, and took longer than we expected.1
We focused on user-centered design, being conscious of flow in input fields, toggling of buttons, language and tone, and responsive design. We also believe that the overall idea is scalable, usable, and an application that we would definitely use ourselves. We also like the tone that the app conveyed, with its playfulness and fun interactions.
- HTML5
- front-end development
- Yelp/Google Map APIs
- backend/front-end connectivity
- user experience
- responsive design
- Bootstrap.js
- work with strangers WOW
We would love to see more detail in branding and graphic design so it feels even more like planning your own adventure. There is also a lot of room to add options in designing such an adventure (such as multiple points of interest, preferred times of travel). We'd also like to add more control on the map page so that users can update their preferences live to display on the map. Other cool features would include exporting a schedule to Google Calendars and displaying highly rated photos of certain venues from Instagram on the map.