Boolen: An Alternative to DoorDash

The inspiration of this project was the Davis Downtown Business Association (DDBA). The DDBA is a business improvement district established in 1989 that represents 32 blocks of local commerce, playing a significant part in facilitating growth and providing a voice for the downtown community. Many downtown Davis restaurants face struggles with high DoorDash fees that impact our survival. This inspired us to create a website called Boolen that not only helps reduce these costs for businesses, but improves the experience for the delivery driver and customer as well.

What Boolen does is reduce service costs for businesses, puts more money in the delivery driver's pocket, and promote a more biking inclusive lifestyle, a mission the city of Davis tries to promote. It achieves this by giving the customer an option to select a delivery from a bicyclist and driver, making the bicyclist option a lower cost, as well as giving a higher pay rate to bicyclists compared to drivers when factoring in gas costs. This allows the bicyclists to take home more money, reduce costs for the customer and business, and overall promote a healthier lifestyle.

We built this project using React for the frontend paired with motion for animations and a custom theme. The backend was built using Node.js + Express REST API using a lightweight JSON database. The frontend structure consists of an owner & customer view. The owner view consists of having a dashboard showing all revenue, orders, menus, and more. The customer view consists of a list of restaurants to choose from, and a breakdown of the costs comparing bicyclists vs drivers when placing an order.

Some challenges we ran into was designing the frontend to have a consistent theme throughout, as it was quite difficult as we continued to implement new buttons/features. Along with this, it was difficult to have the frontend properly send orders to the backend to display on the owner view.

We are proud of having a functional website where we can send orders on the customer view, log in to the owner view, and see all orders properly.

We learned that proper planning is important before creating a project, because adding a large amount of changes during the building phase can make the process quite difficult.

Built With

• express.js
• motion
• node.js
• react