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Shop page
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Shopping cart modal
Inspiration
Pizza is perfect comfort food in times of uncertainty. While national chains like Domino's and Papa John's saw profits skyrocketing during the pandemic despite underperforming for many years prior, modest neighborhood establishments and family favorites with decades of history fought to survive. The public health crisis is a reminder that restaurants serve as community beacons, serving their neighborhood and not giving up. This is especially true of Chicago's pizza places, who inspired us to create a platform for supporting local pizza restaurants, cornerstones of their communities.
The project title is inspired by Life Is Good's motto and vibe.
What it does
We created a platform that highlights the deep-rooted immigrant history of the iconic Chicago pizza and offers stories demonstrating the indominable spirit of pizza restaurants that compel people and companies to purchase pizzas from them and support local businesses.
Notably, the pandemic changed how restaurant operate, whether they're anticipating ingredient shortages due to supply chain issues or worker shortages and inability to deliver waves or orders promptly when a COVID variant affects their staff. Restaurants must increasingly collaborate and uplift one another to survive.
With our platform, you buy in line with your values, share the wealth and do not overburden one place with orders whereby restaurants may not have enough ingredients or enough workers available to support the order. If you purchase lunch regularly for large crowds, you can provide a steadier cash flow to small businesses to withstand waves of demand in this pandemic-battered food industry.
Lastly, because every little bit of profit helps, you can purchase mystery boxes offered by restaurants at the end of the day at a discounted price in order to reduce food waste.
How we built it
We built this using React and Firebase! Mariessa used Procreate and Photoshop to create an original hand-rendered deep-dish pizza artwork, as displayed on the site.
Challenges we ran into
Deploying the website took a lot of trial and error! Thanks to mentors, we were able to learn more about how they work, some of the pitfalls with the latest commit, and why the package-lock.json file can be finicky yet important.
Building an intuitive shopping cart was no small feat — in particular, grouping orders was the trickiest to figure out. That is, I could add an order for pizza 1, and then add another order for pizza 1, and React makes it very easy to have two line items for pizza 1. It took a lot of research and googling and power naps to get it so that order the same pizza twice will show up as one line item with two in quantity in the shopping cart. Considering UI/UX with how people know what changed by animating the number of purchases in the cart when the number changed was a mental workout, too. Implementing the map with pop-up modals was quite difficult, as we ran into many bugs with this aspect and needed to revisit it several times as the site changed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are all React novices whereby all of us can count the number of React projects on one hand, and most of us are learning it for the first time — and we created a project we're proud of!
What we learned
We learned about routes and reducers and how React projects are structured. We also learned about the UI/UX nuances of creating a shopping cart, like wanting to adjust item quantities when confirming items in the cart, adding visible feedback when the number of items in the cart changes, or showing different buttons based on different actions (click on Order button to confirm purchases then leads to filling out address info and allowing people to either Confirm order or Cancel). We also tested and implemented way to handle errors (e.g. could not load pizza items). We learned how to implement modals in React. We also learned a lot about debugging!
What's next for Life Is Pizza
We'd create the vehicle or intermediary on the back end to ensure that the payments go to different payees from the order that was sent.
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