Food Stickers

Allow customers to place orders by sending stickers via iMessage

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Inspiration

We realized that the food industry generates revenue of over $570 billion and has been constantly increasing. We figured that we can develop a new simple, fun and intuitive way of ordering food. We all have experienced messy and complexed food menu and would rather save time by simply placing an order without even texting a word. In addition, the Food Sticker can help and prevent embarrassment for customers who have difficulty speaking English but know what they want to order but it's that fear and the uncomfortable feeling that prevent them to do so. If the customer saw the menu as stickers/image with translated words in their native language, the food ordering process would be a breeze.

What it does

The iMessage sticker pack extension allows users to place their favorite food from their favorite restaurants by sending stickers through iMessage.

For example, a customer walking five minutes from Insomnia Cookies can easily upload a Cookie sticker of their order choice and place an order and pay with-in minutes.

How we built it

We built Food Stickers using Xcode for iOS development, Sketch & Photoshop for the exclusive and user interface designs. We also used Twilio and various others software to develop this project.

Challenges we ran into

Given the time constraints and some tricks with getting the APIs to talk together, some of the data we wanted to collect from the sticker pack extension was harder than expected. This meant that some of the features we wanted to implement were not added into the sticker pack extension. One challenge we had to overcome was to send and receive text messages from the user, configuring a way auto-respond to the user depending on which food sticker was sent to Twilio using its web service APIs was significantly complex.

Apart from not knowing the team members in the beginning, most of our team members had a substantial background in iOS development. Hence in past 36 hours everyone learned iOS development and functionality/capabilities of Twilio.

What we learned

We learned how to take advantage of the new Messages framework in iOS 10 to create an app extension that lets users interact with our app directly within Messages. We also discovered how to effectively use a cloud communications platform known as "Twilio" to retrieve metadata and to send and receive user response.

What's next for Food Stickers

  • We are going to add additional functionalities to our app extension and try to get some real consumer feedback.

  • Supporting different languages and cultures (demographics)

  • Additional Food Stickers 100+

  • Develop iOS Application

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