Etit | Devpost

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Inspiration

The challenges many small businesses are facing inspired the team to build a new way to attract consumers, and create equal opportunity for all businesses through unbiased food reviews.

What it does

An application that gamifies the process of food ordering, breaks the monopoly on food reviews held by companies like Yelp and UberEats, provides cheap, reliable, and verified reviews to restaurants, and uses a review system based on blockchain, completely independent of our company.

How we built it

We first used Adobe Xd and Adobe Illustrator to conceptualize the project. We then proceeded to use Bubble.io to rapidly wireframe and build a production-ready app.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the process, we faced a huge learning curve as it was not as user intuitive as other programs like Figma and Adobe XD. We faced many system bugs as well. While working on this project, the team had to manage time very well over the week along with extracurriculars, midterms and internships.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to use and learn Bubble.io in this past week to create our functional prototype. Within the skills we learned, we were especially proud of learning to use natural language processing to be able to preprocess and calculate the perplexity of each text and its relations.

What we learned

During this project, we learned how to use the various functions of Bubble.io to build a functioning prototype. We also worked on our abilities to collaborate efficiently and effectively.

What's next for Etit

Our highest priority at this juncture is to complete the badges and rewards system, which were left incomplete due to time-constraints. Our next step is to create an interface for the restaurants where the restaurant owners can register their restaurant, hours, and menu items. Afterwards, we want to update the application with bi-monthly campaign and transfer the database into a decentralized system so no single entity/node has absolute authority over other nodes and only read operations can be done. To accomplish this we would need to put a filter on the user’s photo and text inputs with NLP and Computer Vision, which are both services offered by Google Cloud.

How impactful will this solution be to your partner?

Rob hopes to dabble in the food industry and wanted to gamify the shopping process to make it more entertaining. Our app applies that gaming concept, and includes features like, levels, titles, badges, achievements, campaigns, mini-games and rewards. It encourages users to explore new restaurants and review them, while earning points to be the next “connoisseur.”

What is the potential for scalability? How costly would this solution be to bring to scale?

Although Bubble is built on a no-code platform, it allows direct integration with popular web languages (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and APIs for full customization. It can fully replicate the functionality of any full-stack application through code or built-in features. In terms of cost, the main cost involves API calls and a monthly subscription according to the user base. The plans start at only $12/month. Moreover, we are able to significantly reduce the costs of hiring developers as this is a no-code platform.

How original is this solution? Does it set itself apart from other solutions through innovative or non-traditional methods? Does it demonstrate outside-the-box thinking?

Etit employs innovative blockchain technology which guarantees the authenticity of our reviews to our users, for immutable and unbiased reviews. Our solution combines many features to create something outside-the-box:

In-app campaigns: Entertaining campaigns & mini-games to keep the app fresh & engaging.
Mission: Our mission to provide unbiased reviews to create equal opportunity for small businesses heavily resonate with the new generation.
Rewards: Continuous incentives to use our app over others.
Blockchain: This innovation technology guarantees our users of transparent reviews and gives us a unique edge.

Our solution also addresses many other original prompts offered within the hackathon, making it a unique solution. Yelp and Google reviews currently monopolize the food review system, and they both accept paid promotions from restaurants, which makes it unfair for small businesses with less capital, or are not as tech savvy.

How well designed is this solution, from a UI/UX (Usability) perspective?

Etit has consistent branding throughout the app, and the logo is playful, yet still sophisticated. In color psychology, orange communicates warmth, fun and ignites an adventurous feeling; which is exactly what our app is striving towards. It is often used in food industries as well. Icons help the user navigate the app with ease, and the different colors we use throughout the app creates contrast and brings attention to specific features.

How well designed and executed is the solution from a technical perspective?

In the span of a week, we were able to create a production-ready application that solves many challenges that small businesses face. We infused our experience with graphic design (using Adobe XD), UI/UX (with Figma), and full-stack development (making API calls) to create this application. Our app includes a fully functional authentication system, reward point tracking, user profile, review system, and rating system. We believe our solution is very well executed and designed.