food-truck-finder

Project 3 Food Truck App - Alexi, Cole, Troy

Link to Our App

Link to Our Mobile App

Trello

Trello

Elevator pitch

'Whats up ninja turtles!?! are y'all totally like hungry? Well what If I told you that I knew of every dope/bomb.com/fun food truck nearby? Well I do, cause of Foodie Foodie Truck Truck. Tacos, Exotic, Hamburgers, all of your chronic-tasty-treats... We got it all. Wait? What's that? you are actually a food truck owner? Well with our app we make it super simple and steezy to let your followers know where you are. Just open the app and it updates your location for you, automatically! pretty cheesy right!!!

-by Alexi + Troy

Ideation and Influences

The Original Idea came from Troy Evans who proposed that there were'nt any good food truck finder apps for the greater Denver area. And one of the major porblems that the exisiting denver food truck apps had, and also what foodtruck owners expressed, was that they didn't allow users to easily find trucks. We found that if you took some time to find a truck via grubhub, roaming hunger or yelp, and then tracked down their webpage, and found their schedule you could eventually figure out where they were and if they were even open. But it is not an easy process and we knew we could find a better way.

Plan

Our plan was to build our own database, that stored all the pertinent details of the food trucks our users were looking for, and to use the google maps api to clearly display the location of the trucks, while making it a 1 step process for truck owners to update their location. Also we wanted to focus on the mobile design for the interface given that most of our users would be using the app on their smartphones.

Technologies Used

1. Express
2. Node.js
3. JavaScript
4. Angular
5. Google Maps API
6. Sass + Gulp
7. HTML/CSS
8. Heroku

Challenges

User Authentication -- we spent an excess of 20 man hours on this

Version Control -- Very Challenging managing our combined workflow

Hosting On Heroku -- took 8+ hr to solve all issues with online hosting and databse setup

Front End Routing

What We accomplished

1. Worked as a team to solve all major problems, and managed to delegate tasks well enough that there weren't any problems with overlapping work.
2. Automatic Update of Truck location for Owners
3. Easy To Use and Visually Appealing Layout with clean user interface
4. a solution to find where great food trucks actually are!

Our UX mockup by Allie Williams

Individual Contributions: Teamwork made The Dream Work

Troy: Sassy Gulp, styling Front End controllers, header/footer navbar, styling, file structure

Alexi: Google map logic, geo-location functionality, connected Front to Back end, styling

Cole: Built Server + API, back-end CRUD routes with node.j/express, and deployed app to heroku

Future Plans

We plan to add User authentication/admin functionality for truck owners, because we don't want anyone to be able to add their own trucks.

Filters, so that you can sort trucks that are displayed by food type, and search functionality for finding favorite trucks.

Favorites: We want to add a custom rating that lets users 'like' their favorite trucks.

User Research

Survey used

1. What food apps do you currently use?
2. What reasons why?
3. What are your pain points for this app?
4. Do you use your phone to find and/or order food?
5. Do you seek out food trucks when you are looking for food?
6. Have you wondered how to find your favorite food truck?
7. Do you use google reviews or any like app for your decisions on food/retail?
8. Have you used a food truck finder app before?
9. If you were looking for a food truck would you want to find one that is close or is highly rated/recommended?
10. How far (in minutes) do you typically travel for a restaurant?
11. As a owner, what would you want to reach out to customers/let them know where you are?
12. What kind of app would you use as an owner to help people find you?
13. Do you currently use one?
14. As an owner how you you like to communicate with your customers?
15. Owner usage to see their reviews and have access to respond to a review?

Responses to the survey

Interviewe #1

1. Yelp -- see reviews how many stars, dislikes thed ads
2. Yes to find food but note to order, thought about starbucks, doesn’t have a problem with walking in and ordering
3. No -- thinks it would be cool to be able to find trucks
4. Yes, almost anytype of product not just food-- clothing, etc..
5. No
6. Highly rated over close
7. 10-15 min at maximum
8. Pretending to be an owner(why????)
9. Yes
10. Yelp?
11. Emails, text messages?

Notes: I felt as if high ratings were an important part of the decision making process… I think distance traveled to a restaurant should be determined in minutes, instead of miles. Would you walk to a restaurant if it was 5 min walk or a 45 min walk?... I think the average user probably measures distance traveled anywhere by the time it takes to get where they want to go.

I preceded with the owner questions just to hear more potential Ideas about what an owner might need. I agree that its not the most practical approach, but I was just trying to

Interviewee #2

1. Yelp. Allows see reviews, google maps offers the same thing but it doesn’t always provide info, can’t find food I want. Yelp is up to date.
2. Food type, price, categories.
3. Go straight to the food
4. No.
5. Want ASAP the kind of food I’m in the mood for, price is secondary. People just want food that they want. Filter by type of food, how far at this exact moment.
6. Eat out for convenience, not luxury.

Interviewee #4

1. Postmates, UberEats
2. “America” and it’s also convenient
3. When they get my order wrong and surge delivery fees
4. Yes
5. If I’m at a bar, but not otherwise.
6. No
7. Every f**king time. I look at Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, I look at all the pictures and their reviews.
8. What? Is there one.
9. Close first but not one with 1.5 stars.
10. Couch to door.
11. Pass
12. Google Maps
13. Social media

Additional comments: I’d like if the app showed a little taco for a taco truck so I would know the type of food they offer.

Takeaway: Convenience definitely seems to be key when it comes down to developing this food truck app.

Pasty Republic:

1. Heavy use of social media as twitter, FB, instagram, and yelp to let customers know where they are located. They clearly do not have any other apps that they use currently to reach out to other customers. Their website has them currently using GrubHub, uberEATS, and groupon to help promote their brand/truck.
2. On the business side they are using google calendar to keep a schedule of their locations and pretty much stick to their schedule. Their schedule via their site is for this week (5/1/17) shows them moving from Brewery to Brewery with an occasional Cidery here and there. They also do events and can be booked on their site.
3. They were intrigued to have an app that would integrate both google calendar and maps to help them reach out to their customers from an app that would make it convenient to have a wider market as there currently is not anything besides social media that the could use to help get more customers.
4. www.thepastyrepublic.com @PastyRepublic info@thepastyrepbulic.com 303.455.3558 4166 Tennyson St Denver, CO 80212

Interviewee #5

1. Google maps is the easiest and only app prefered to be used
2. Ease of use, never lost
3. Broad terms can be used to find what you are looking for
4. Nothing other than google maps
5. Word of mouth are more helpful than rating system
6. Actual people telling me about the food and establishment
7. Do not seek food trucks, but aren’t against using them
8. Food is usually good, fun to eat from
9. Don’t try to find food trucks
10. Food trucks in portland are easy to find, they were everywhere and were easy to find
11. No never used an app to find a food truck
12. Time based to travel no more than ~20 min
13. If the app was useful then would use
14. If it was convenient to use and to help find the type of food that I am looking for
15. More scared of the sketchy food trucks and not the app to use
16. Would find an app easy to use and helpful if there was a resource for it

Interviewee #6

1. No, there are currently no apps for usage. Did work for PostMates for a side job for a while.
2. Their app was easy to use and clean to work with
3. Use google maps the most of the time ~70%, rest is word of mouth
4. Word of mouth recommendations are of personal rating of food and establishment
5. Ratings are 100% influential in choices for usage in food and retail products
6. Do seek out food trucks and like going to them
7. Resource to find them would be completely useful
8. Not used a food truck app
9. Food trucks are a culturally different, there is a lot involved with food trucks and you generally have higher quality. Food quality is a high priority for the truck selection.
10. A resource would be highly helpful and would be curious to find other trucks
11. Time to travel to a restaurant is no more than 25 min.
12. Using the reviews on google maps are helpful once you can find the what you are looking for
13. No idea how many food trucks or how many different food types

Add notes: Useful for it to also have additional info on events for the Brewery that they are located at as well.

Research Results

The market for food trucks in Denver is growing at an exponential amount every year. The problem however, is that most people do not know the type of food trucks out there, how many there are, or where these trucks are located. The trucks themselves have had to resort to using different social media outposts like FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram... just to hope to have a client base or customers who would be interested in finding them. If you are like me though, I do not go out of my way to find a food truck because frankly they aren't easy to find. Unless you are at a bar/brewery around Denver then you get used to seeing Food Trucks. The gap for truck owners and customers to connect is so vast in the Denver market that now there is time to have a tool that can bridge it for everyone. So far the results have shown that there is a need for a way for people interested in food trucks to have a tool for them to find a food truck closest to them. The overwhelming issue is that there is not currently any known way for people to find them other than word of mouth and by seeing them randomly on the street. People whom currently use technology from our interviews to find restaruants use primarily google maps, postmates, and yelp. These apps have ease of use for people to find what they are looking for in established full scale restaurants and do not currently have up to date information or any information in regards to the food trucks. There clearly is a need for an app similar to those mentioned that solve the issue of finding trucks and having exposure to current seeking customers. In the small research of the usage for trucks was very insightful. They currently have a bunch of other apps to try and reach out to customers but none that directly help connect the customer with the truck. Their expression in an app to reach out to customers and make it easier for them to be found by potential customers. They did have a interest to integrate with both google maps and google calendar to help them track where they are going. They would also like to consider having some way to reach out to their customers with social media integration as well.