Foodie Tour

A travel planning application for travellers who are big foodies!

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Inspiration

For those who love travelling and food... Many people love to travel all over the world and experience different cultures, but some people are satisfied with just having McDonald's or pizzas while travelling. We are people who love travelling and local food when we go to new cities or new countries. The best way to experience a different culture is not only by travelling but also by having local foods. Our idea originated from the thought, why can't we plan what to eat while planning where to go? How do I know what food is good near the tourist spot that I am going to visit? What would be the food that I can have only when I go to this remarkable city or attraction? We built this app for those who love both travelling and gourmet food, as people who love to embrace different cultures and are eager to try them! If where you go matters, what you eat there should matter too! If you know where you want to go, Foodie Tour will show you what you can see, do, and eat there AND find the best route to enjoy your sightseeing and have tasty local food simultaneously.

What it does

People in this generation love to travel and eat. We are young, and our lifestyle is to enjoy travelling and visiting local restaurants wherever our travels take us. People usually use google to find local restaurants and see their locations. Making a travelling plan with tourist attractions and gourmet restaurants can be a pain in the neck. However, this app we created makes it easier to do all of this at the same time! It is a one-stop-shop for all your travelling needs! After entering the city name to travel, all the tourist attractions AND local gourmet restaurants within 1-3 km of the selected tourist attraction will show up. When users select where to go and what to eat, the app will create the best travel route including all the tourist attractions and the restaurants with a few clicks. This route provides estimated time, distance, and ways of transportation, and links the location of each spot to Google Maps.

How we built it

We had come to imagine an app that satisfies people who love to travel and seek gourmet food. We conducted a brief mind-map meeting and sketched ideas to decide what would be the main function of our app by drawing rough wireframes. We built the main page first, which takes users' input by entering the destination the user wants to go to. Based on that main page, we built other pages accordingly. The next page that we built is a page as 'Search Result' which shows a list of tourist attractions. To interact with this page, we designed another page called 'Places to Eat'. This page is prompted when the user clicks an attraction. This page was built to present places to eat nearby the selected tourist attraction. As details, we added review stars, a dollar sign to show its affordability, a button to call the restaurant in case of making a reservation, a button to show its location on a map, and the website of the restaurant. When the user selects all the tourist attractions and places to eat, the app should make the best route how to visit all the places including the restaurants in the most efficient way. Therefore, we built another page called 'My Route Details' to show the user the best route for a particular itinerary. We added features to give detailed but simple information on how to travel between the places. These also provide information on each travel distance, time, and transportation for each route created. Lastly, to overview all the routes that the user has created so far, we made 'My Routes' page which allows users to view records of past travel routes as well as plans for future travel routes.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge we ran into was deciding how detailed the information should be presented to users. We want the information to be presented as intuitively as possible. To elaborate on this, we hope the information is easy to read and understand for anybody even if users' mother languages are not English. A lot of people travel to foreign countries where they cannot speak local languages. A lot of people whose mother languages are not English travel to English-speaking countries as well. We sorted out what is important and what is not necessary to present on the pages. As a result, we used more photos and icons rather than numerous text explanations and did not include excessive details. Travel planning can be complicated as we want when we decided to micro-managing the trip.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There are three achievements that we are proud of in this project. First, we developed and implemented our ideas creatively and realistically. Foodie Tour mingles with two different themes: travel AND food. All the features in the app are well represented as we initially planned. The app is successfully aimed for target consumers who need the service of our app. Second, our design is simple and easy for anyone to use and organically connected among the pages.
Functions interact well with one another. By using more icons, photos, and untied colour schemes, the app works as one single object with many pages. Third, for us, this UX Designathon is our first experience in competition and developed UX design project. Everyone is afraid of the "first time" to do anything but we accomplished it better than we expected in a short amount of time limit. We earned confidence and momentum to continue to participate in future other competitions like Designathon and Hackathons.

What we learned

Our team is a group of students majoring in software development, and this is our first time participating in a UX Designathon. There are two major things that we learned throughout this UX Designathon: one is how to use Figma, and the other is the importance of cooperation and communication As soon as we decided on the topic of our project, we continuously had video meetings and shared our own ideas and opinions. We began with the assumption that our preferences and characteristics look alike, but as the project was developed, we found that each member's ideas and perspectives are more variant and unique than we thought. We enjoyed cooperation, sharing each one's travelling experiences, and designing the functions we were going to include in our app. This project reflects our tastes and is also the result of many conversations and ideas we have shared and worked on together. As we design specifically using Figma for this project, we're immersed in the charm of Figma that we use it for the first time. We were synchronically sharing each other's opinions in real-time while adding and subtracting design elements and expanding our ideas. This is genuinely a great opportunity to learn and experience using Figma as well as feel how powerful teamwork can be.

What's next for Foodie Tour

The next step of the Foodie Tour is to build community and to make each individual's trip plan shareable. Users will be able to share their travel routes and refer to other people's travelling plans when they make their own. They can express if they love other people's plans by clicking a like button or leaving comments. They shall leave questions in other users' travelling plans if they want to know how it actually worked.

Built With

  • discord
  • figma
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