Quickbite Ordering Menu App

By: Yauheniya Nikulyak

&
Thach Doan
CST 499: Capstone
Dr. Eric Tao, Brian Robertson, and
Cassandra Eccles
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Executive Summary

Quickbite Menu app is to offer services to local restaurants to display their menu openly

for customers to be able to order while not having to wait in a line at the store. Our services help

restaurants have a faster turn-over in customers, shortening the time customers wait in line. We

also offer end of the month data to keep track of sales. With food industries blooming, we

believe that in a couple of years this app can be used at many locations. Currently there are

many similar apps such as Doordash, and Uber eats, but we believe that this app can be used at

malls, airports, and schools. We can have many displays in the middle of the food court at the

mall, or airport, while anyone can order using those screens. The restaurants will then receive

orders and process the order and call out numbers of orders for customers to pick up. We are a

small team who are testing out for a client, and hope he can put a good use to this product. If by

chance it will take off we will work on planning to expand with setting up a server, and charge a

small percent of monthly income. We will manage all hardware and software if we ever plan to

charge.
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Table of Contents

Introduction/background 4
Problem 4
Solution 5
Evidence of the problem 5
Benefits of the solution 6
Client’s goals 7
Client’s project objectives 7
Software development team / freelancer’s goals 8
Software development team / freelancer’s project objectives 8
Environmental Scan/Literature Review 9
Stakeholders and Community 9
Approach and methodology 11

Ethical Considerations 12
Food industry and employment 12
Age-friendly environment 13

Legal Considerations 13
Privacy 15
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Introduction/background

Our mission to create this app is to help local restaurants to speed up their productivity

and generate better customer services. Our app will introduce customers to have access to order

their food through a display of choice from the restaurant. This display can be ipad, android or

just a big touch screen monitor. The display will show all items the restaurant offers and

customers can make a selection if they want to order by pressing plus icon or cancel by press

minus icon. There are many apps similar such as Doordash, Grubhub. Our products will only be

in store for customers who want to spend time to hang out with friends at a local restaurant.

Problem

How long are you ready to wait in a line to get your favorite food or drink from a local

restaurant? I often go to my favorite tea store, but most of the time I find it frustrating, the line

tends to never end. The wait time is usually 30 minutes per order, so when I find myself there I

usually get upset and angry. Now oftenly when I think about going to that same store, I will start

to question myself: “How long is the line?” Is it worth waiting for 20-30 minutes for one single

drink? This led me once to leave for a different place that has a much faster turnaround. The

problem is that customers have to spend time waiting in a line and when they are seated or

served, they have to wait even more until the order is ready. Our client needs a solution for the

problem: to reduce the wait time for the customer. This was a major issue for their small
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business, he sees great success in his business. He worries about losing customers because the

wait can sometimes be longer than 20 minutes to buy a drink or two.

Solution

Our project is to design a simple menu and order creation for local or small business

owners who can not afford to buy an expensive system for their store. The project will allow

customers to order as they walk into the store and not to wait for the order to be

prepared/cooked. Everything can be prepared for customers when they wait to be served or

seated. The app will take in order, once customers have submitted their order. It will send the

order directly to the kitchen so the chef or preparer could process the order. The food or any

other other will be served to their table when customers are seated.

Evidence of the problem

The reason we got this idea is from a Client: Nhanh Nguyen. He owns a local tea store

that sells both drinks and some snacks. His store generates a decent number of customers but the

owner told many times that the line would take longer than 20-30 minutes. The owner wants to

speed up the process and make it more modern and convenient for the customers. He feels that if

customers keep on waiting for their drinks, eventually they would go somewhere else. Tea

business in San Jose is very competitive, there are many tea stores at every mall.

When I was in high school, I used to work at the mall. When we worked at a mall we

usually had half an hour for lunch. How can we get food and have a decent lunch when the lines

for every restaurant at Food Court are very long? This Menu App is needed to save people's

time in many ways.

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The store owner above wants to run a business experiment by introducing an ordering

improvement. While the project is requested by a single business owner to validate their idea, it

may have potential success and application in other places such as cafes and restaurants with a

waiting line. It also may lead to a different approach/development request.

Benefits of the solution

Happier customers will attract more customers by word of mouth and faster turnaround

will make more revenue. The app will also generate how many orders customers made for

certain types of items. So, stores can get better statistics of what customers' favorite items are

and what products/ingredients the store needs to buy. Restaurants will be able to set up how and

where they want to display this app menu in the store or provide a quick access to the app by

quick URL (for example, http://​eat.at​/​EDDYTEA​). The app will benefit many small businesses

for better planning as well as owners will have better resource planning. It will be important that

everyone can save plenty of time instead of wasting the time to wait in a line.

When restaurants are open, they generally want better income and more customers to

shop there. Customers are essential but with more customers there can be problems with

customers waiting in line too long. We’ve seen this plenty of times during my stop by our

favorite local spots. In order to solve this problem, we came up with the idea of this app to allow

restaurants to display their menu of items close to their front door, or where restaurants choose to

place their app menu. This will allow customers to order as they walk in or when they hang out

with their friend at a table. This will help improve the lines to be less crowded and generate

faster turnover rate.

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Client’s goals

1. Improve wait time and satisfaction of the client’s customers. Wait time is a metric.

2. Increase income with improved wait, serve or order preparation time. Income is a metric.

3. Attract more customers. Number of served customers is a metric.

Client’s project objectives

Run a study by involving modern mobile technologies in customer service, hoping that the

addition of a mobile ordering system improves metrics described in goals.

Narrowing down:

1. Create a high level proposal of the ordering system that works on customers’ mobile

devices and allows submission of an order to the kitchen personnel.

2. Find a software development team (or a freelancer).

a. Ask them to design the system UI for customers and for personnel.

b. Ask them to evaluate the effort in terms of time and money.

3. If proposal (2) is affordable, request the team to initiate the work, otherwise continue to

search for an affordable option (2).

4. Propose amendments from personnel after the 1st development iteration is completed.

5. When the amended product from (4) satisfies the requirements, train the personnel to use

the new system.

6. Run the study for a period of time (weeks, months) to see if the product improves metrics

from goals.

7. Based on the outcome of (6) make next strategic steps.

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Software development team / freelancer’s goals

1. Find a customer to provide a project to build.

2. Perform software development to get client’s satisfaction.

3. Receive compensation for the work in the form of money or any other beneficial

agreement.

Software development team / freelancer’s project objectives

1. Collect the requirements from the client.

2. Propose high-level system design.

3. Propose UI mocks to the customer.

4. Provide estimations in terms of time and money. See if there is a space for negotiation.

5. Amend, validate and signoff system design and User Interface.

6. Choose programming languages, frameworks, systems and platforms to develop and host

the product.

7. Implement the next (first if there is no previous) version and request feedback for

improvements.

8. Repeat (6) until a client is satisfied.

9. Collect and analyze the experience received during the development of the product.

10. Decide if any changes are needed in (6): were the chosen programming languages,

frameworks, systems and platforms effective? Are there any better alternatives?

11. In the case of Quickbite project, decide if the client is satisfied with their metrics.

○ If they do, then develop the next steps to promote, franchise the product in other

places.
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○ If they don’t, then decide if other studies in other restaurants are needed.

Environmental Scan/Literature Review

Doordash, Uber eats, and Grubhub are some of the apps that allow one to order food to

deliver to their own home. Those apps will take in an order of the restaurant we choose and send

out an order to that restaurant. The restaurant then takes that order through their system, and

prep and those apps will have someone pick up the item and deliver it to the person ordering it.

While these sound great for a restaurant but it comes with a charge. Doordash charges

restaurants 20 percent per order (Yelo, n.d.). Uber eats come at a stepper price of 30 percent per

transaction(cameron, 2018). While we use these services the prices can be a little higher than the

original price compared to shopping at the store(pisani, 2018). And what’s more important: all

these services do not solve the problem of customers in line.

This process is very similar to what we are doing through our Menu App. Instead of

doing it online, we focus on clients who like to hangout with friends or family stopping by

restaurants to eat. The app will be taken in order from a tablet or display in the restaurant and

sent into the kitchen to be prepared and when it is done that number will be called for the

customer to pick up.

Stakeholders and Community

List of stakeholders

1. Our client: a business owner who requests the idea validation/experiment/product.

2. Out client’s customers: they may potentially get improved quality of the service.
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3. If the client achieves one of their goals (quality, speed, efficiency and income

improvements), it may benefit the community by changing the industry allowing more

working places.

4. Development team

a. We’ll get our first work contract.

b. We’ll earn more experience in the development process, technologines, customer

communication and business development.

c. Depending on a way that how the project goes we may get one of the following

artifacts:

i. potential monetary compensation;

ii. more work requests;

iii. product as a completed business experiment if our client decides to invest

in the further development (start in more places, franchising, etc).

As our first stakeholder is our client, they will define the business requirements of their

product idea/experiment. The will share the details of how the project layout will look like and

will make the final decision in their menu display. They will also provide pictures for the menu

for their shop to be displayed. They will eventually make the final decision to use our app that

provided or just chooses to take the test and put it aside. The community will be our client

customers or any person that is ready to make an order. They will use the app and if they do not

like it, they will leave feedback and eventually if it does not work out they will no longer be

using the App.

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Generally as a community there won’t be much negative effect, just test if they like the

function of the apps. It will just probably waste some of their time trying out. While it will

greatly benefit the community if they can catch on and use it to save them time not wasting

standing in line and being frustrated. For our Client to be affected, they are spending time and

resources to test out the app. As for benefits if this does work out, it will increase their

efficiency. They will have faster turnover customers, the ordering system will help them build a

great statistic in their own products and what to order in weekly or monthly. A good statistic of

what to order will decrease income going out and increase productivity. If this app does take off

into having uses at a mall or any type of Food court at airport. This will be convenient for

people who are short on time to have a decent meal and not stress and eat as you are on the go.

Approach and methodology

We will use Spring Boot for the server-side development: this is a Java based framework

that supports quick development of RESTful interfaces and effective database connections. We

will use Bootstrap UI/Javascript framework for client-side development. Spring Boot and

Bootstrap are one of the most popular and well supported frameworks. The code will be stored in

a private GitHub repository.

We will use Agile methodology when the development will be performed by creating

milestones that will correspond to the goals above. The project will take 8 weeks, 1 iteration per

week. To track the tasks and provide the way for the customer to see the progress we will use

PivotalTracker (​www.pivotaltracker.com​) as an online Kanban dashboard which allows basic

functionality for free. The purpose of the Kanban dashboard is to provide visibility and progress
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transparency and on-time communication between the business owner (our customer) and us.

We will organize stand-up meetings to let everyone in the team know about the progress,

difficulties and concerns. Each week we will have a project planning and grooming meetings to

have a way to correct chosen approach, work and flows.

Ethical Considerations

Food industry and employment

When it comes to making money, people have different views of what is right and what is

wrong. New startups like Doordash and Uber Eats disrupt existing consumer ecosystems

radically changing people's lifestyles and the customer behavior. These startups changed the

industry in the way that there is no need to look for places to eat outside of someone's home

anymore. User-friendly applications allow quick access to the kitchens of many restaurants and

cafes and 30-minutes delivery transports the food to a person. However, these applications hurt

some businesses with their pricing politics: delivery fees are high. If a given restaurant opts out

of delivery, the business risks to become obsolete and lose customers. Sometimes entrepreneurs

create kitchens in low-rent space and post a menu on a website. This allows taking orders via the

internet. They don't need to hire waitstaff or buy furniture or rent places with high-traffic

locations. Sometimes quality suffers as in comparison to old-fashioned places where customers

have to go out and visit a physical location to have food, takeouts with delivery service may have

issues with delivering wrong items, losing food or delivering late. Restaurants lose customers

because of the delivery service.

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Our application is not meant to disrupt or change the industry. We don't ask restaurants to

change their model and fire people because some profession is not needed anymore. We want to

optimize the queuing and ordering system for places that work in an old-fashioned manner.

Age-friendly environment

With our technology moving so fast, it is still very hard for the older generation to keep

up with young people. Applications may get these groups of people confused about what to order

and make them think that it will be too much effort just to order something. As we understand,

the more choices the older generation have when dealing with technology, the more they will be

confused with the unknown and give up. We want to mitigate this problem by making the app

very simple and accessible. With fewer buttons and simplified one-at-a-time options and clearer

pictures of products to display. This will help everyone's experience and customers will be able

to request additional assistance if needed.

Legal Considerations

Some of the features about this app is similar to many of the apps out there in the market

today. Olive Garden allows customers to order desert on their mini-ipad they have on display.

The features are very similar, but when making orders it will alert your hostess and they will take

in order. Grubhub, Doordash, and UberEats apps have some functions to what our app has.

These ideas are pretty similar to our product, so the copyright of this app does come in concern.

While restaurants display pictures of their product, what happens if those pictures are not what

they are offering. This can come in question if we took pictures of some existing restaurant and
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just ignored copyrights. There are more concerns that we want to solve with the help of legal

advisers: what if a restaurant is under franchising, can they use our app or is it illegal to use third

party apps?

We are not trying to piggyback off ideas of existing businesses. As it is mentioned

above, we are optimizing the queuing and ordering systems. That's why we don't expect many

problems with copyrights but plan to seek legal help with this as well.

A possible legal issue is food poisoning when a customer may order and consume

something that causes some infection, sickness or allergy. Potentially a customer may file a

lawsuit against a business, however in practice not everyone is allowed to produce/cook food and

sell it to customers. Each business goes through a set of diligent reviews from the Health

Department to get Food Service License, Building and Employee health permits. Also, it is up to

a business owner of how to organize various ordering systems and whether to use mobile or

other devices: their responsibility is to make it in a safe and reliable manner so customers and

employees are protected from health or life threats like bacteria, infections, viruses, dirt, expired

or poisoned food/components. We are building an ordering system or an addon to some existing

ordering system to help a business owner to organize orders better. We don’t change their

cooking techniques or ways they deliver their products. However, we may explicitly waive the

liability off the developers in the contract.

Security

One of our major concerns is dishonest customers who want to have fun and do some

prank by just ordering and leaving a restaurant without paying for the order. We will solve this

problem by requiring customers to pre-pay their order upfront.

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Privacy

We will follow best practices in order to store customer's data (whether private or

payment related) in our application. There are techniques to store data in an encrypted way per

customer, salting passwords and using modern O-Auth authorization systems. Using existing

reliable payment gateways like PayPal may even help with not storing payment related

customers' data at all.

Timeline/Budget:

Before the class starts: Gather data/pics and price details. $0 dollars spent gathering pics.

Week1: Build User Interface (UI) of the website with database schema, get client’s

feedback. $20 for 2 months of Lightroom

Week2: Amend UI from client’s feedback. $0

Week3: Create logic for website. $0

Week4: Test logic and all functions. $150 for receipt printer and paper

Week5: Getting clients to run tests and get feedback. $150 galaxy tablet.

Week6: amend according to the final feedback and have the client do final tests. $0

Week7: finalize project and create video for presentation. $0

Week8: presentation for the class. $0

Total budget: $320

Resources Needed:

In order to use our app, we need to have access to a Galaxy tablet or iPad. We decided to

go with a Galaxy tablet for testing phase, our final launch will be up to the client as to what their
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preference is. We expect our solution to be cross platform and cross browser. We also want to

test if our back end would print out receipt so we need to buy a printer to do testing phase. We

also need images of products and prices of each item being offered at the store.

There is an assumption that everybody in the team has a personal computer or laptop for

work purposes available.

Milestones:

The app is based on the layout of the menu and how to take it in order. Our first major

stage would be our ​design of the User Interface​. How a menu will display is an important

aspect to get customers to be intrigued to use. After designing the layout we have to focus on if

each button is working out like it supposed to be. The next stage is ​database design and

schema​. The two most important stages are client side and ​server side​ development of

receiving, processing and completing an order. ​Functional and end-to-end testing​ stage

happens after each major feature is completed. Stages of ​feedback collection​ and ​customer

communication​ may be small but must happen after or in parallel to each iteration. End-to-end

testing with end users and ​collection of their feedback​ would be the next stage. ​Launch of the

product​, ​experiment result collection​ and ​analysis​ are the last three stages.

Risks and Dependencies:

One of the biggest risks is the User Interface and its acceptance by product end users.

Each UI element has to have a well-thought location. This includes element containers, various

inputs (text inputs, areas, selects, radio or check boxes). We want users to have the option to add

on toppings to their drinks or food every time they add an item to their cart. We need to allow
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the user to make a decision about the quantity of purchased items and how they add toppings to

each item. This process can slow us down if we are not careful with how we handle this

objective.

Another risk is data and images collection that may take more time and attention then we

expect. It is also a dependency and we may need to provide help to our customer with parsing

texts or organizing the storage of the images.

One more possible risk is a bad API design of the server side functionality. When our app

takes order, where does the order being sent to. This is our major dependencies problem, cause

our main server needs to know where order is being sent to. The back end server needs to know

how to receive this information either through a receipt printer or another tablet display in the

kitchen of what order is coming in. With a failure in this step we will have to re-design our

menu function and backtrack our steps.

Final Deliverables:

1. Database schema and initial data dump.

2. Product source code for both client and server sides.

3. User Interface assets: images, HTML and CSS.

4. Images and resources to corresponding data stored in the database.

5. Documentation about functionality, system requirements and setup instructions.

6. Product server installed on some hosting or cloud service of client’s choice with

administrative credentials and resources for the client’s access/control.

7. Contract agreement on possible terms for bug fixes and support.

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Usability Testing/Evaluation

What needs to be tested with UI user study/client communication ​(travis, 2016).

1. We want to validate ​how usable and user-friendly an idea of entering a short store

URL in a browser by a user​. This is one of the most important features in our product:

avoiding one-time installations of Android or iOs applications in order to order items in

stores.

2. The next possible usability concern is ​how reactive and dynamic User Interface built

using HTML and CSS will be in comparison to native UIs on Android and iOs​.

3. How well the UI will be accepted by users​ in user study. Collect the feedback and apply

changes.

4. How well the UI will be accepted by the client​. Collect the feedback and apply

changes.

5. How well the administrative UI will be accepted by the client’s employees and the

client​. Collect the feedback and apply changes.

Comparison methods

1. A/B testing between the design variants.

2. A/B testing of the working product: client will need to compare the profitability and

effectiveness of the application.

Team Members:

Thach Doan: Design log-in pages.

Gathering client requirements and testing with the client.

Gathering information for app layout.

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Design menu app layout on paper.

Initiate database.

Communicate with the client and set up meetings.

Main roles business analytics and software developer

Yauheniya (Jane) Nikulyak:

Design project structure and system layers

Design database schema and domain entities

Java backend code to implement business logic

Front end development with Javascript, HTML, jQuery, AJAX

Main roles product manager and software developer

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REFERENCE

Yelo. (n.d). How DoorDash Works | Business Model & Revenue Sources Explained.

https://jungleworks.com/doordash-business-model-how-doordash-works-earns-revenue/

Cameron, K. (2018, March 26). Why Uber Eats Will Eat You Into Bankruptcy. Forbes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2018/03/26/why-uber-eats-will-eat-you-into-bankrupt

cy/#48ab483b21f6

Pisani, J. (2018, Feb 4). Fast food is coming to your doorstep, but it can cost more. USATODAY

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2018/02/24/fast-food-coming-your-​doorstep-but-ca

n-cost-more/359219002/

Travis, D. (2016, Jan 15). The 1-page usability test plan

https://medium.com/@userfocus/the-1-page-usability-test-plan-dbc8c3d7fb54
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Appendix

Travis, D. (2016, Jan 15). The 1-page usability test plan

https://medium.com/@userfocus/the-1-page-usability-test-plan-dbc8c3d7fb54