Pod Thai's Small Biz, Big Impact

Members:

Josephine Lee (jlee936@uic.edu)
Michelle Tanner (mtann3@uic.edu)
Christopher Harrison (charr31@uic.edu)
Manasvi Sharma (mshar52@uic.edu)
Hafsah Khan (hkhan212@uic.edu)

Inspiration

All of the members of this team have been to this restaurant in the past and really enjoyed the food that was served. We noticed that the small business was relatively unknown despite the good food because of their site's lack of detail and usability. When we heard about this track, we knew that we could make a positive impact on their business through our combined efforts. In order to do so, we created a website that improved the areas of user experience where the current website falls short. We came up with the idea of helping a beloved business in the UIC neighborhood through this project and we began by putting ourselves in the customers’ shoes and organized what we believed would be the most beneficial features to include in the implementation of the site.

What it does

We created a secure website with an appealing interface, making sure to include information that a typical user would want to see about the business. The site focuses on simplicity and ease of usability to boost visibility and ensure smoother operation for the business. We integrated a home-page that contains the basic information about the restaurant, a menu page for users to view the menus, as well as developed a prototype for online ordering, which was previously not a feature of the site.

How we built it

We designed the site in Figma, where we recognized areas of functionality and understood the overall feel of the site we were aiming for. By having a template and a plan to follow, it made building the site and the production progress flow smoothly. We built the site using the Astro framework, which utilizes HTML, CSS, and JS. As the team is not super familiar with Git repositories, we utilized the Live Share extension by Microsoft to live code along with each other, getting assistance as needed and understanding the code live as it is being developed.

Challenges we ran into

A few hours into the project, our dev team realized we dove into the code without properly organizing our tasks. However, once we acknowledged this, we made sure to communicate frequently on Discord and keep each other in the loop; this allowed us to ensure our ideas aligned with the end goal, which we fully fleshed out on Figma. Working with the Live Share extension was also a solution to this challenge we faced; by having the code be shared live, we were able to keep each other updated on various aspects of the code and help out on small issues without dealing with merge conflicts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the benefit we can bring to the small business we chose. Specifically, we connected with the restaurant ourselves and are in the process of fully deploying our project for Thai Bowl.

What we learned

Two of our members are freshmen, and they certainly learned a lot! From experiencing their first real hackathon and getting a feel for how Astro connects CSS, HTML, and javascript all into one package for convenient site building, we felt that we were able to support the team with the non-technical skills that we brought to the table, while also getting more insight on our team leaders’ strengths.

What's next for Pod Thai's Small Biz, Big Impact

Our next goal is to enhance our Website demo for ready-utilization. For example, getting the full story and history of Thai Bowl to share and implementing more back-end features needed to actually place orders securely online.