AppEase: App Building Platform
Using APIs to create sophisticated experiences for business owners and their customers.
OVERVIEW
AppEase is an app development platform for small businesses.
It offers a streamlined customer experience and an easy-to-use, customizable interface for business owners allowing them to provide services on par with large-scale competitors. AppEase facilitates the development, deployment, and upkeep of mobile apps for cafes and coffee shops to manage mobile orders conveniently and seamlessly.
PROBLEM
Designing a platform to facilitate online ordering can be costly and difficult for small businesses to maintain.
SOLUTION
Create a platform that allows small businesses to create their own unique, individually-branded mobile app using a simple, templated interface.
INITIAL RESEARCH
Creating an app is (really) expensive.
Creating a custom app can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 (g2.com).
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
How do you expect to benefit from a product like this?
How would you expect the ordering process to look like, for you and the customer?
Would it be beneficial for you to have a feature that helps track inventory?
What struggles do you face with your current [online] ordering system?
What would you have on your ideal dashboard/ordering process to look like as a business?
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I analyzed 4 of the most popular drag-and-drop builder products and found that none specifically targeted the food service industry.
USER STORY
IDEATION
Business owners felt that a custom app would be complex and challenging to maintain.
Based on the responses from one of the interviewees, they were concerned about adding another software to their existing system and how they would interact.
How Might We… design a platform that is compatible with an existing system to ease operational frustrations?
The solution…Integrating Chit with a POS system and for the sake of this project we decided to use Square, a service used by a large number of small businesses. Through additional research we discovered that Square offers an API, the Orders API that would enable orders sent from a Chit app to appear in Square’s POS and vice versa.
Setbacks+designing across platforms
Designing across multiple softwares and devices made this a challenging project. Ultimately we were able to create a customer-facing website featuring a design studio for app customization. We chose to focus on the design suite because it was a key part of the user experience in this product.
TESTING CONCEPTS
FINAL SCREENS
The final product
CONCLUSION
Moving forward+what I’d do differently next time.
This was by far the most challenging project I worked on. Despite this, I am immensely grateful for the experience because it thought me to think of user experience in broader terms. That being said, a few things I learned:
Consider the scope. Especially in the early phases of the project, my group and I would struggle to identify the most important features of the project , which led to scope creep.
The design process is not linear. While there are many versions of what the design process might look like, I learned the process is not always a smooth transition from one phase to the next. I often went back and forth between phases as I learned more and better understood the goal.
Failure is necessary for success. There were points during this project when I felt it would be better to scrap all our work and start over from scratch. Over time, we was able to build off of our failures until we felt like we had hit the mark.
