College Town Feature

Team Members: Maryam Azgomi, Annie Huynh, Alexis Lopez Fire Wings | College Town Feature (CTF)

Background and Context: Our primary goal is to amplify brand recognition for lesser-known eatery establishments within Davis. Our client we are assisting is Fire Wings, a fried-chicken restaurant that is competing with larger chains like WingStop. As Fire Wings, using this College Town feature is essential to causing change in the growth of the business and solidifying our position as wing enthusiasts. The objective is to expand our business, enhance our brand recognition, and attract a pool of new customers. Despite offering an arguably better wing experience than our competitors, we challenge breaking through the noise in the local community. To overcome this, Fire Wings needs to become a go-to destination for wings in Davis and foster growth.

Users and Pain Points (problem statement): Based on our clientele research, we discovered that a significant amount of UCD students are unaware of Fire Wings’ presence. This indicates that there is room for improvement in their marketing and branding strategies to attract more customers.

Therefore, we identified two primary issues stemming from their ineffective marketing strategy: Inadequate utilization of their app as a reliable platform for customer ordering and failure to capitalize on the UCD student population as potential customers.

Solution and Requirements: To address these challenges, we decided to create a feature on Fire Wing’s app that will enable them to leverage the opportunities presented by our UCD college town and its diverse customer demographic. Since catering services are a form of business attraction, our app feature optimizes all food order services, such as catering for large events and facilitating fundraisers in collaboration with the business. This ensures that customers can effortlessly coordinate their catering needs with efficiency and convenience while also allowing the business to expand its visibility through the acquisition of new app users.

Designs: Our product functions as a standalone feature that will be integrated as an add-on to the existing Fire Wings app, much like a Google Chrome extension. It is specifically designated to UCD student organizations to fulfill all their catering needs. Upon downloading the Fire Wings app, the user navigates to the “UCD” button located on the bottom of the screen, where they are greeted by our Welcome Page. Our Welcome Page provides the array of services that Fire Wings offers. Customers can choose to Track their current Order, sign up for Catering services, or inquire about fundraising opportunities.

To track a current catering delivery order, users can select the “Track Order” button. Our team conducted interviews with UCD student organization staff, who revealed challenges in the order receiving process. These difficulties often led to miscommunication between delivery personnel and students regarding the pickup location. To address this issue, our feature offers a unique functionality: the ability to select a precise pickup location at accessible UCD parking lots, aimed at minimizing any confusion and streamlining the pickup process.

The “Catering” page serves to allow seamless communication between customers and the business. It provides a centralized platform where customers can effortlessly convey their catering needs, preferences, and specifications to the business while enabling the business to deliver tailored catering solutions that exceed expectations.

Lastly, the “Fundraising” page extends beyond traditional catering services, offering a comprehensive service for organizations to host successful fundraising events. Customers are prompted to customize event details to align with their specific objectives and explore options for organizing fundraisers. This engagement will lead to an increase in Fire Wing’s business attraction and garner the attention of the college-town population.

Success Metrics: To get an effective metric for success we will be tracking two input metrics. Firstly, an increase in new users with the app to make orders and be measured by an increase in app downloads, and online order frequency in 4 months. Secondly, an increase in brand recognition within the community, and this can be measured through 4 months of surveys. As for the output metric, its success can be measured by the extent to which individuals not only become aware of the Fire Wings brand but also actively choose our restaurant over the competitors. This can be measured by factors such as repeat purchases and positive customer reviews indicating a growing affinity for our brand and products among consumers.

Go-To-Market: Envisioning widespread adoption of our product, our goal is to integrate this feature across various websites of Davis restaurants. The hope is to elevate their connection with students, placing these establishments prominently on the map. In doing so, it provides them with opportunities to actively contribute to and support the Davis community. As a testament to the success of our model, we plan to demonstrate results with our minimum viable product, Fire Wings. The evidence consists of a significant increase in app engagement, evidenced through a surge in user reviews. The growth in reviews is attributed towards the enhancements in the overall user experience and service quality within the app.

Open Questions & Future Considerations: How can we boost engagement with businesses with a lack of sufficient staff to cater for larger-sized businesses? How do we boost student engagement then?

Built With

• canva
• figma