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Dyne: The Future of Dining
Inspiration
Have you ever had a bad experience at a restaurant? Was the service slow, did you wait long for food or did someone write down an incorrect order? Have you ever not known what to order and just randomly picked an item because the waiter was already then, and were later disappointed in your choice? We know we have, and that's what gave us inspiration to build Dyne.
The digital revolution has yet to reach the restaurant and dining industry on the client side of things. We wanted to build something that felt different and futuristic. Our vision was a completely cashless and wait-less experience, where the user would only get to enjoy the positive aspects of eating out while completely removing the possibility of a negative experience.
We wanted to make dining better for everyone. Users would get a customizable approach to building their dining package and enjoy 100% of the experience, while restaurants would get better information on the raw materials they would need on every day of the week.
What it does
Dyne aims to reinvent the dining experience by eliminating its inefficiencies while preserving the best aspects of eating out. With Dyne, users can select, customize and purchase dining experiences before actually going to a restaurant, so that their dining time is rid of waiting times and is also completely cashless. Dyne also offers a list of recommended dining experiences in the user's area, so that they can easily access the best of what their region has to offer, without having to research restaurants and meals. Want to order ahead and have your plates ready to be served? Want to pay digitally but still sit at a table, be served and eat with your friends? No problem, you can use Dyne.
The user experience and overall execution of the application is what we are most proud of in this project. It's an innovative yet simple idea, that pushes people's definition of dining out with family, friends or business partners. We aimed to preserve the social quality of the dining experience while removing the aspects that serve to its detriment, such as long wait times for plates, bad or delayed service, wrong orders, and the hassle of paying after the dinner is done. With Dyne, you sit, you eat, and you leave, all cashless.
How we built it
The core of the project's backend are NCR's Silver and Site APIs. They offer all of the restaurant and menu information that will be passed on to users, while also communicating a purchased reservation to the restaurant, complete with food to be made, time of arrival and party size. All of the API requests and data processing were implemented in Swift.
The frontend is built entirely in Swift using UIKit. The content and the image urls are directly pulled from NCR's APIs.
Challenges we ran into
Getting familiar with NCR's APIs and laying out how we were going to use each piece of information and connect different objects (such as food items to menus to restaurants) was the first challenge. Having a solid plan and following through during our development time enabled us to dive into an area that none of us had much experience in. Two of the three members of the team did not know how to code in Swift prior to the experience, so the next big challenge was learning the language and its HTTP calling frameworks, while attempting to develop a working application, was the next challenge. We researched best practices and decided that SwiftyJSON was the best course of action, as it was easy to learn and also an elegant solution.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the manner in which we were able to seamlessly implement the APIs into our flow, in a manner that felt elegant and robust to change. We are also very proud about the execution of the idea, as we worked hard to build the fullest and most complete application we could based on an initial idea that we ourselves would use. The UI feels very sleek and the overall user experience is intuitive and streamlined, offering a very satisfying application experience.
What we learned
The team members that did not previously know Swift got to dive into the project right away, picking up a completely new language that is one of the most relevant skills in the current mobile dev scene. Everyone also learned how to implement HTTP requests with Swift, read and interpret API documentation, and manipulate data and information in order to achieve an end goal.
We all also got a lot of experience with the NCR APIs, which may very well be directly applicable to our career paths. We learned how to work better in a team, use version control and merge conflicts successfully.
What's next for Dyne
The next and most important thing we need to implement is a real payment solution. We are looking into integrating with PayPal, Apple Pay and other digital payment solutions in order to make a real working app. The most important innovation to the app will be party splitting. We don't always know everyone's specific tastes and we don't always want to pay the entire bill, so having a way to invite your friends or colleagues to a dining experience, having each person chose their course and pay separately, is the most important new feature to include. We would also like to include an AI solution that analyzes trends as well as the user's orders, and builds and recommends experiences tailored to ongoing trends and the user's tastes.
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