Flave Project

Flave is an app designed to incentivize the hungry masses to forgo food delivery, at least every once in a while, and enjoy local cuisine in person. This is accomplished by allowing the user to earn “Flave Cash” through dining in at local, non-chain restaurants. This app-specific currency can then be exchanged for menu items participating restaurants choose to offer.

My team and I were shown only the front-facing end of the application with which patrons will interact. However, I recognized during our introduction how important it was to make certain restaurant owners and managers saw value in integrating the app into their daily flow, along with potential roadblocks.

I identified the following challenges for which we could design a solution:

• How can Flave incentivize small, local restaurants that may:

  • Have very little experience accommodating apps into their workflow

  • See little need in bringing in more dine-in customers if they have limited capacity and business is considered good

• How would the restaurant measure the benefit of offering menu items in exchange for Flave Cash versus:

  • The actual cost of items

  • Time spent on the app updating offers, menus, and other information

  • Time spent onboarding new staff

    
    

We began by identifying needs and challenges specific to non-chain or smaller restaurants. We also wanted to discover what Flave could offer as incentives even if the restaurant was required to pay a small fee for access, thus benefitting both the restaurants and Flave.

Interviews

Members of my team conducted interviews with restaurant owners and managers in-person or via email. I personally interviewed people who had owned a small restaurant or food truck, or worked in the food industry as management for more than five years and had experience using apps (specifically delivery apps as these were the most common) as a part of their daily workflow. 

Challenges Feedback:

• App must be simple to use

• Smaller restaurants often share a single tablet to process interactions

• Employees may have widely disparate experience with applications / technology

• Frequent turnover can complicate onboarding

I also received feedback during these interviews on two solutions I had pitched to my team regarding gathering customer feedback via the Flave app as an incentive and giving the restaurant a means of measuring cost versus benefit.

Solutions Feedback:

• Information about customers would be a good kickback for restaurants, even if restaurants had to pay a monthly fee

• The restaurant needs to either have a guarantee that a certain amount of money will be spent in their particular establishment, or have a way to measure spending from Flave users.

Competitor Research

My team and I looked at the business models used by comparable competitors to Flave. I examined Open Table and, based on their reservation model, suggested we give restaurants the ability to drive traffic during times they might be slow. To do this, I recommended we give restaurants the ability to quickly and easily construct ads that can be pushed to the Flave Feed users already see at times the restaurants specify.

The four campaign types are as follows:

• Happy Hour

• Events

• Flash Sale

• New Item

While not included in the paper prototype, I conceived each ad type would show on the Flave Feed map above the restaurant as a specific icon denoting the type of deal or event. The user could then select the icon for more info.

This prototype showcases:

• The ability to swipe left or right to view templates at actual size, or select from a menu to view all ads in a certain category

• The full ad creation process

• The publication process which includes, as I imagined, the ability to view and publish ads to the Flave Feed as well as social media feeds

Campaign Run Time

I also designed and built a campaign run time interaction for the final prototype. This allows restaurants to choose how long the ad displays on the map portion and restaurant information portion of the Flave Feed.

Included is the concept that if a restaurant pays for a higher tier with Flave, they can also set times for an additional alert to be sent to the feed, reminding customers of the deal or event. I restricted additional alerts to no more than once per day to prevent spamming users.

Main Navigation

I decided to keep the main navigation as simple and unambiguous as possible, landing on a left-hand slide-out navigation with clearly labeled buttons activated by a top hamburger. This mimics Google Drive’s simple mobile menu style and makes onboarding simpler.

I suggested that any section-specific navigation should appear at the top under the header to bring immediate attention to it and prevent the user from being confused by the sudden inclusion of a footer. This advice was used for the design of the “Campaigns” section. The only place we broke this rule was when accessing the Flave Feed portion of the restaurant version of the app which is designed to simulate what the patron sees on their end.

Analytics

I suggested adding the following specific analytics, all of which my team included in the final prototype.

Overall Analytics:

• How many Flave users visit per hour / day / week/ month / year

• How much visiting Flave users spend on average per visit (using point-of-sale integration)

• How far Flave users have traveled to visit the establishment (using geolocation)

• Age demographics of visiting users

Campaign (Ad) Analytics:

• Income earned during the duration of the advertised event / deal (using POS integration)

• Flave user interactions (clicks, calls, shares, reservations) through the campaign information on the Flave Feed.